Inheritance
by Aisho9
Summary: In the parallel world, the twin children of Rose and the Meta-crisis Doctor have landed themselves into trouble: they took the TARDIS out without asking. Groundings are imminent! But along the way, they find something suspicious: a vanishing space port!
1. Lieutenant Joran

Doctor Who!-but not. :) This is AU, but it's a canon AU, if that makes sense. It's following the adventures of Rose and human!Doctor, but my story primarily has to do with their children, the twins Grace and Jamey. Have fun!

* * *

He first met the twins in 2114.

He'd been stranded on the floating cliffs of Hasfar, courtesy of his captain, who did not take kindly to Joran's particular brand of humor. He'd been tossed cliff-side shortly after making the statement "At least I didn't get your daughter pregnant, yeah?" No, the captain didn't think Joran was funny at all.

Under most circumstances, Joran would have been ecstatic at having escaped the corps without being court martialed or killed, but under most circumstances, he wasn't a thousand feet in the air, sitting on dry, arid rock that supported no life whatsoever thanks to its highly acidic mineral content. He had a pistol, but the energy cell were all but drained, and while he had materialization gear on him, he'd only downloaded patterns for things like weaponry, clothes, and decks of cards. Only last week he'd thought that perhaps it might be prudent to add a few nutritional patterns, but until then, he'd never had a need for them.

So—basically—Joran was stranded, utterly stranded, without food or shelter, and thought it very likely indeed that he'd die soon.

A few hours passed, and as Hasfar's three suns shifted towards a sunset that only happened every five Earth days, a sound filled the air. It was the sound of engines, of that he was sure, but of what kind he couldn't tell. He'd never heard anything like them. It sounded almost as if the engines were fading in an out of existence.

Some fifty yards from where he was standing, a box had appeared, and when the engine noise stopped, it solidified; it began as blue, but then faded to a color very like the stone it rested on, and the initially smooth surface roughened until the box was almost indistinguishable from the rocks around it. It was remarkable technology; Joran had only heard stories of it, and even then, it was only theories.

The surface of the box grew a seam, and opened outward as a door. Out of it came two people, humanoid, one male and one female, with faces too similar to be accidental. Either their race was one of clone-like similarities, or they were related.

"Oh, look," the female said, as she tied her brown hair back into a ponytail. "Hasfar. That's wonderful. Or it would be, if we were on the _surface_. I told you we landed too soon."

"Shut it," said the male. "The view is better."

"Coincidence," she retorted, and he ran a hand through his blond hair irritably, making it stick up even more. They stopped abruptly when they caught sight of Joran, who was leaning against a boulder with his arms folded across his chest. He knew that he cut an impressive figure, with the green and purple light from the sunset blazing across his face and highlighting every inch of his muscular, corps-fit body. The tightly cut uniform hid very little.

"Hello," Joran said mildly.

"Hello," the male said back. He had shifted so that he stood in front of the woman, just a little, but neither of them seemed to notice. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Joran of the Soladan Quadrant," said Joran, and gave him a snappy salute. "Alpha Colony of the Second Earth Dynasty, to be exact."

"Oh, goody," said the woman. "A human."

"Metahuman, thanks," said Joran. "Who're you?"

"I'm Jamey, and this is my twin sister, Grace," said Jamey, and flicked his fingers against his forehead in a sloppy copy of Joran's salute.

"Origin?" asked Joran.

Jamey pursed his lips, exchanging a look with his sister. It was she who said, "Earth."

"Pull the other one," Joran said, straightening. Neither one of them looked like they were joking, which was incredible, because a trip from Earth to the Soladan Quadrant was at least thirty years—in stasis. Awake, the speed would have to be reduced, and that would easily add on another ten years. There was no way they could be from Earth and look as young as they did. Suspicious, he asked, "Where on Earth?"

"London," they answered, together.

"Hah!" said Joran. "There's no country on Earth called London! Where are you really from, huh? The Besdina System? Tolisiog?"

"London's a city, moron," Grace said, with an expression of such disgust that Joran believed her. "As in London, England."

Joran's eyes squinted. "_England_?"

"We should have checked the database," Jamey said to Grace, in a very put-upon tone. "Are we the British Empire or the English Federation here?"

"Unified Countries of Europe," said Grace. "Hopefully."

"You don't even _know_?" Joran snapped. "It's the Kingdom of Ireland now. England fell five centuries ago."

"Whoops," said Jamey. He didn't look as if he cared.

"Every time," said Grace. "Every blessed time. Can't you _ever_ fly straight? We wanted the seventh year of the UCE, not fifth century Kingdom of Ireland. No wonder the light's greenish. We've gone past the pollution dumps."

"If _you_ hadn't fried the yearometer—"

"Oh, right, it's _my_ fault!" Grace said hotly, her cheeks growing red. It was then that Joran caught on. They weren't just travelers: they were _time_ travelers. The last he'd heard, time travel had been categorically banned. It was too destructive, too dangerous to attempt. But they'd landed just fine, and so far as he could tell, Hasfar hadn't erupted into flames.

"I'm sure it's a big deal, this yearometer," Joran said, "but look, I'm kind of stranded here. Notice the lack of ship. If it's not too much trouble, I could really use a ride."

The twins stared at him.

"No way," said Grace.

"Why not?" Jamey and Joran demanded of her simultaneously.

"Dad's _already_ going to kill us when we get back," Grace pointed out. "And Mum too, probably, now that we've gone too bloody far and can't even fetch her one of those Hasfarian roses."

"Oh, c'mon," Jamey protested. "It's not like we're going to take him home. They wouldn't even know."

Grace's lips pressed together, but then so did Jamey's, and they glared at one another in silent argument until finally Grace heaved a sigh. "Yeah, whatever, fine," she grumbled, stomping back to the box. Joran hurried forward to fall into step with Jamey, who he now considered to be his savior. He held out his hand, and Jamey obligingly shook it.

"I really appreciate this," Joran told him. "There's not a blessed thing to eat on these cliffs, you know."

"Thank the Irish for that one," said Jamey. Ahead of them, Grace had opened the box's door and stepped inside, leaving the barest crack of the interior visible—a massive room, brilliant and shining, the colors shifting slowly from one to the other like a bubble in slow motion. Jamey walked in, leaving Joran standing in the doorway, open-mouthed.

The inside of the box rose breathtakingly high, a meandering cathedral with a ceiling that twisted like a conch shell. The curls of the shell came down into supports, and in the center of these were the controls, a circular hodge-podge of levers and buttons and cogs that boggled the mind. If someone had asked Joran to pilot the thing, he wouldn't have known where to begin. At the center of the controls was a tall crystalline spire, driving straight upward into the ceiling, and where it touched the controls the pale surface turned opaque and merged seamlessly with the yellow-brown center console.

"Might as well go back a few centuries and see if we can't find some roses," said Grace, who was already monkeying with the controls, twisting and pulling and jerking things that looked, to Joran, like the contents of someone's trash heap. "What would it hurt to try?"

"You'll miss," said Jamey. "We always miss."

"No small wonder," Joran broke in, aghast, as he took his first few steps inside. The doors snapped shut behind him. "Look at it! It was designed by a madman!"

Grace grinned at him from the other side of the controls. "No, it was _grown_ by a madman. Hold onto your hat!"

"I haven't got a hat," said Joran, and a second later he was thrown unceremoniously to the floor as the entire contraption bucked. He thought, for a moment, that everything would fall apart—it shook awfully—but after only a few terrible moments, it stilled, and the engines stopped their shrill whining. "What kind of ship _is_ this?" he demanded.

"It's a TARDIS," Grace told him. She seemed far more cheerful now, running around her ship's controls, than she had out on the cliffs. "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space."

"Time travel is outlawed," Joran said, moving to grip the pale steel railings that surrounded the controls. "It's supposed to be too dangerous. It's supposed to put holes in the fabric of the universe."

"Yeah," said Jamey. "If you're _daft_."

Grace laughed aloud. "Be nice, Jamey."

"Who _are_ you people?" Joran asked, feeling something suspiciously like fear creep up his spine. He couldn't say that it was anything they did, exactly. Certainly their general carelessness with horrifically advanced technology was unsettling, but they looked like regular people, just two strangers traveling the stars, nothing strange at all. But the longer he was around them, the more and more unnerved he was, until he was seriously beginning to wonder if they were even human.

"We told you," said Grace. "I'm Grace, he's Jamey."

"It's not what he means, though," commented Jamey, lounging on the pilot's seat. His long arms and legs went in every which direction, and it struck Joran suddenly that they were just teenagers. Very smart, very advanced teenagers with a time machine that didn't destroy whole universes.

"Grace and Jamey Smith," Grace said. "That's our names."

"It's not what you are," said Joran.

"Oh, true," agreed Jamey. "Very true. Nice observation there, lieutenant. We weren't lying, we really are from Earth. Our father immigrated there some years ago."

Joran caught on. "Immigrated from where?"

"Everywhere," said Grace, and threw a lever. It looked like a hand brake. "Not this dimension, though. This is his ship, you see."

"Your father is a time traveler? An alien time traveler?"

"He's half-human," Jamey said defensively. "Or three-quarters, I'm not sure. Human enough. So." He clapped his hands. "Now that we've got that bit done and over with, it's time to move on. Tell me we've landed in the right spot, Grace."

"Ninety-five percent sure," she answered, and crossed over to the doors. She opened the doors a crack and peeked out. "Jackpot," she said, and vanished.

* * *

Joran sat on the edge of the floating cliffs, legs hanging off the side and his fingers tapping restlessly on his knees. Beside him, Jamey was stretched out, hands folded on his stomach, and though at first the younger man looked calm, every so often his jaw muscles would clench so hard as to betray the true extent of his irritation. They'd landed hours ago. The suns had long since set, and Grace worked down by the light escaping from the TARDIS's doors, peering closely at each and every specimen she gathered.

It was apparently very important to get just the right rose.

They looked all the same to Joran, though Jamey had looked at him like he was crazy when he suggested it. Well, sure, maybe some of them had slightly different coloring, but they were all still roses. Just roses. But in one thing Joran and Jamey were completely in agreement: it did not take quite _that_ long to pick out a damned flower.

"What's the rose for, anyway?" Joran asked, watching the winds blow through the forests below. The trees moved in silver ripples along the hills, though from so high, they looked more like grass. If he hadn't been to the surface and looked up at the hundred-foot high trees, he might not have believed it. "Can't you just materialize one for your mum?"

"You can't fake a Hasfarian rose," Jamey murmured, eyes closed.

"Exactly so," Grace agreed. "They're really rare, as well. They're our Mum's favorite flower, you know. Dad goes out and fetches one for her whenever he's been bad. Ah! There you are, you sly bugger!"

"Did you find one?" asked Joran.

"Not one. It. I found _it_." Grace brought it over for them to see, cupped gently between her palms. "It's the always the same rose, don't you see? Dad tried to explain it once—genetic ghosts, I think he said—but that's why this rose means so much. It's Mum's rose."

"I wondered about that," said Jamey, eyes finally opening. He looked the rose over for a bit, scrutinizing it, before rolling neatly to his feet. "Well! Mission accomplished. Where do you want to be dropped off, Joran me lad?"

"Not so fast," Grace interrupted. "I have to sever it first."

"You cut it off its branch," said Joran. "How much more severed can you get?"

"Oh no," said Jamey.

"Oh yes," answered Grace, and raised the sonic screwdriver.

The air split with a shrill scream of rage, and all around them, the floating cliffs began to quiver and shake. The entire island seemed to flex, as if it were getting ready to do something truly awful, but the twins weren't staying around to find out, and Joran wasn't far behind. They ran back to the TARDIS as fast as they could.

No sooner had the doors shut than gravity dropped away. The TARDIS had been flung straight off the cliffs, but Jamey hadn't been fast enough at the controls, and now they were falling instead of flying. The wind whistled past, louder and louder, and within the depths of the TARDIS it sounded like crying.

"Hover mode, put it in hover mode!" Grace yelled at her brother, and he obligingly leapt for a lever, yanking on it hard. The feeling of being on a roller coaster abruptly stopped, and outside, there was nothing but silence. Grace glared at Jamey overtop the fragile Hasfarian rose. "What the hell was that?"

"Mistook the gyroscopic stabilizer for the automatic drift control," Jamey snapped, running back around to fiddle with something else.

"Automatic drift control," Grace repeated.

"_Yeah_. Automatic drift control."

Grace's expression was livid. "That would've been brilliant if we were in _space_, you nimrod! Did you even _read_ the manual? You skimmed it, I bet."

"Oh, yeah, because _you're_ so brilliant at piloting," he retorted, face growing red. "If I remember correctly, it was you who got us into this mess to begin with. Tinkering with the wiring, oh, that's a great idea, and then you go and fry the fast return switch as well. How long were we stranded on Teladrongo Three, again?"

"Don't be such a child," snapped Grace. "It was only a few weeks. Be glad I fixed it at all!"

"Time out," said Joran, and the twins turned together to glare at him. He stood his ground. "Someone needs to tell me what the hell just happened back there."

"The roses are neural extensions of the floating cliffs," said Grace. Her voice was calm, but her cheeks were still glowing with suppressed rage. "Like feelers. Really, really sensitive feelers. Severing the neural connection hurts a bit, like someone snapping you with a rubber band."

"It sounded like it hurt a little more than that," Joran said in disbelief.

"No, she's right," said Jamey. "It's just a twinge."

"But how do you _know_?"

Jamey's eyebrows came up. "Because Dad asked, of course."

"So what you're saying is," Joran said, "not only is a hunk of rock alive, but it has little flowers that are actually neural extensions, and you know this because your dad is a time traveler who can speak to rock."

"No, we know this because of the TARDIS's translation circuit, which translates any alien language into our native language," Grace corrected. "But everything else, pretty much, yeah."

"You're nuts," Joran told them.

Jamey grinned. "It has been said."

* * *

The TARDIS, Joran soon found, was a little more than a big control room: there were rooms, tons of them, linked by hallways and ladders and mirror-transports (which, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with actual mirror-transport technology, but was just a clever way of saying the door looked like a mirror until you went through; really it was a perception filter of a very ingenious kind). There were rooms for reading, rooms for dressing, and rooms for food, swimming, and target practice. He'd been very excited about the target practice room until he found that while there were indeed targets, the only allowable weapon inside was a rubber band. ("I'm quite good," said Jamey, to which Grace said, "But Uncle Tony is better.")

There were some rooms that were cordoned off, and some that could only be entered on Wednesdays, and so on until Joran was dizzy with it.

"It _is_ rather daunting," Grace said to him, leading him back to the control room. "Dad's been talking about cutting out the dimensional control unit, to make it smaller, you know."

"Terrible idea," said Jamey. "I love the complexity."

"You love the sports pub," replied Grace, "and that would be the first to go."

They were heading for a space port, officially categorized as Subsection Theta, but known to its patrons as Sub-Nine, where Joran was hoping to catch a transport. There were freelancers who frequented Sub-Nine who might like the idea of having a former lieutenant of the corps, given the intensive training one had to undergo. He might even get paid.

Grace worked the navigational controls while Jamey engaged the engines, and a few moments later (Joran still couldn't get over that—time travel! In a box!) everything quieted. He went to the doors and pulled them open, a smile already on his face, but where the main street of Sub-Nine should be, there was only dust.

"Huh," said Jamey, right behind him. "I imagined it a little more—populated."

Joran walked out onto the asteroid's surface, boots making little puffs of interstellar dust rise into the generated air. He could still see the shields above his head, making the stars blur and warp but keeping in the air, which meant that somewhere there was a generator working. It wasn't a comforting thought, however. The generators were burrowed into the heart of the asteroid to protect against attack and were set to run on autopilot for centuries.

"Something's wrong," he said, and turned slowly in place. Sub-Nine was gone. Utterly gone. He stopped facing the TARDIS, which now boasted a grey, pocked-marked exterior, with two curious twin heads emerging from an awkward-shaped door. "Did you mess up the year again? Did we go too far?"

"We double-checked it," said Jamey. "It's the right year, mate. Sorry."

Joran shook his head stubbornly. "No. No. That would mean that an entire space port has been destroyed! How can that be? Look at it, it's just—gone! No rubble, no craters, nothing! That's _impossible_."

"Impossible is a four-letter word," said Grace. "There's no such thing. Now, look, I'm really sorry about your space port, but this flower won't last much longer. I have to get it to Mum before it withers. We'll just give you a ride after, yeah?"

"Are you daft?" said Jamey incredulously. "We can't take him home! We'll be grounded for a year! For ten years!"

"We can't leave him on an empty asteroid, either. Suck it up, brother."

The twins looked at one another, brown eyes having a conversation Joran wasn't privy to—it looked serious, as if they were debating just how dead they were about to be—but in the end, Jamey conceded the point and nodded. They all piled back into the TARDIS. Joran was last, lingering at the door, looking at the space port he had visited not even three months past. It had been a bright, cheerful place then, full of two things: astrolighting and alcohol. Perfect.

"Next stop, home," murmured Grace, to no one in particular, though Joran, who was gently closing the TARDIS's doors, had an idea that she was actually talking to the TARDIS itself. The engines kicked in, the TARDIS lurched, and away they went.

* * *

Joran stared into a pair of darkly livid brown eyes and felt, deep in the pit of his stomach, a violent kick of fear.

"I'm the Doctor," said a voice, normal enough, which seemed to belong to the eyes. Joran didn't know for sure because he still hadn't looked away. He felt as if he were staring down a cobra. "Move aside."

"Yessir," Joran said, automatically, and stepped neatly to the side. Jamey tumbled out first, pushed by his sister, who was bearing the sonic screwdriver jauntily in one pocket, the blue tip visible out the top. There was a woman, Joran realized, standing behind the Doctor; she was blond and had a sweet face, and she was smiling at Joran like they were sharing a joke, though he wasn't yet quite sure what the joke was.

"You stole the TARDIS," the Doctor growled. Joran clenched his hands to keep them from shaking. This fellow was alien—_clearly_ alien—and powerful, as well, if his ship was such a brilliantly advanced piece of machinery. Joran didn't want to be anywhere near an alien of that caliber, much less a cranky one.

"Accidentally," said Jamey.

The Doctor scowled. The woman behind him had effected a stern frown, but every so often she'd look at Joran and a little twinkle would show up, as if on the inside, she was still smiling.

"It was _dangerous_," said the Doctor.

"Yeah," agreed Jamey.

They looked at one another, having another brown-eyed conversation, very like the one Jamey and Grace had had earlier. It ended with a mischievous smile creeping up the Doctor's lips. "But it was great, wasn't it?"

Weird. This family was _weird_.

"It was _brilliant_!" cried Grace, entering the conversation once the danger was past, which Joran felt was a strategically smart move on her part. "We went to Teladrongo Three, and a half dozen others—it took us a bit to learn how to steer properly—but eventually we got the hang of it. Guess where we went last, Mum?"

"Second to last," corrected Jamey.

"Guess where we went second-to-last, Mum?"

"Where did you go second-to-last, Gracie?"

Grace, with all the timing and precision of a magician, brought the rose out of nowhere and presented it to her mother. In the yellow sunlight drifting in from outside, the rose took on a spectacular, shifting hue, very much like the inside of the TARDIS; Joran thought it was far more beautiful on Earth than it ever was on Hasfar. The twins' mother gasped and took the rose, holding it as if it might fall to pieces.

"Look at that," she said. "It's my rose, Doctor!"

"Well done," said the Doctor, clearly impressed. And that was that. The TARDIS's doors were shut and they all (with Joran tagging along behind, unsure what else to do) went out of the garage and into the house. There was no talk of perpetual groundings or mass killings. Instead, besides some passing remarks on the beauty of the rose, all that was said was, "Tea, anyone?"

Joran thought they were all insane.

* * *

Their mother, as it happened, was named Rose, which brought new significance to their frantic search for the rose on Hasfar. The twins' grandmother was called Jackie, their grandfather was Pete, and the Smith family, when they weren't flying in the TARDIS, worked at a place called Torchwood. It wasn't just the parents, either; the twins worked there too, though as far as Joran could tell, they didn't do much. The TARDIS now looked like a police box, this wasn't Rose's or the Doctor's home dimension (how did _that_ work?), and Smith wasn't actually their surname.

"Dad doesn't have a last name," Jamey informed him, working on his car, which he seemed to be outfitting with thrusters. "Or if he does, he hasn't told us. Smith is just an alias. But it's on the marriage license, so that's what we are. Smith."

"Is that a warp drive?" asked Joran.

"Oh, heavens no," said Jamey. "It's a spatial flux accelerator."

Joran's eyebrows drew steadily upward. "On a _car_?"

"It's not illegal or anything," Jamey protested.

Joran took in the elaborate wiring and welding job going on just to retrofit the spatial flux accelerator to the native engine, a little incredulous, and said, "Not _yet_."

"Don't tell Mum," said Jamey.

* * *

There was a very pressing need for bread ("Baguette! Why is there _never_ baguette?" the Doctor howled) which necessitated a trip to the bakery, which was some distance from the house. It was decided that Grace would go, and that Joran would accompany her. Joran, quite frankly, just wanted to be rid of the lot of them, but no one seemed particularly inclined to give him a quick spin in the TARDIS.

"I don't want to go to some rubbish bakery," Joran said to Grace, nonetheless following her out to the sidewalk. "I want to find out what happened to the space port. Something that big just doesn't vanish out of the skies, Grace. Someone's behind this and I'm going to find out who."

"Oh," said Grace. "Careful there. That's cliché. We Smiths try to steer clear of clichés, unless they're particularly relevant."

"You're not even listening to me!" snapped Joran. He stopped in the street to glare at her. "There were thousands of people on that space port! Can't you even bring yourself to _care_?"

Something in her eyes changed, very slightly, but enough that suddenly she looked very much like her father. There was no smile on her face now, none at all, and her posture, before careless and blasé, was stiff and erect. "Listen to me very carefully," she said, in a voice that he would not have immediately recognized as Grace's if she hadn't been standing directly before him. "No one—and I mean _no one_—is going to go rushing out into the fray until my father's had a chance to look over the data we collected. That space port wasn't destroyed, it was transported, and there are precious few races in the universe who can manage a thing like that. That means this is big leagues, and you, my friend, are nothing even _resembling_ big leagues."

Joran was aware that he should answer, but he couldn't seem to get his mouth to work. He thought—he wasn't sure—that he was afraid. Then she smiled, a great big lovely smile, and she looked like a teenager again. "Come on," she said cheerfully. "That baguette won't fetch itself."

It was a long walk to the bakery, and it gave Joran time to think. He put them all in order and came up with this:

One. The Smiths were, without a doubt, aliens. He didn't care what percentage of them was human or quasi-human blood, they are all of them aliens, even Rose.

Two. They knew more—much more—about the universe than he did.

Three. He was walking down the street in a tight-fitting uniform and none of the passersby seemed to even care. (Perhaps persistent exposure to the freasish Smiths had rendered them insensitive to things like space-corps uniforms.)

Four. The twins gave him the willies, just a bit, when they weren't making him feel stupid.

Five. Lastly but most importantly, the point that really stuck in his craw, the bit that twisted his gut and ruined his appetite, was this: he was, for the foreseeable future, stuck with the lot of them.

Wonderful.


	2. How To Fell a Judoon

Chapter Two! :) This chapter opens as the twins, tired of waiting for their father, decide to take matters into their own hands - but they need a little insurance against grounding, and that insurance is their poor Uncle Tony. (He really gets put through an awful lot.) There's a bit of fun in this one, mostly at Tony's expense, but I'm really getting into the mystery of the disappearing space port. Adventure time!

Allons-y!

* * *

"I don't care _where_ you're going," said Uncle Tony, standing on the sidewalk with his arms resolutely crossed. "I don't care when, or why, or—"

"C'mon, Tony," Jamey pleaded. "It'd just be one trip. Real fast, practically a spin around the block. We just need a chaperone. That's all. No one's asking you to do anything."

"That's _Uncle_ Tony to you, mister," Uncle Tony said, although he was only four years older than the twins. "And I'm not buying what you're selling. The last time you lot took me up in that wretched machine, we landed in the Cretaceous Period!"

"Jurassic," Grace corrected. Uncle Tony glared at her, but she didn't seem to notice. She turned to Joran, as if she were about to share a secret, but said at a perfectly clear volume, "He screamed like a little girl. They were only pygmies."

"They were _hardly_ small," said Uncle Tony stiffly. "Now all of you, leave me alone!"

The twins exchanged a look. After two weeks of living with the Smith family, Joran had learned that this look precipitated dangerous and horrible things. Grace affected a put-upon sigh, and Jamey said, with the utmost sincerity, "You've brought this on yourself, Uncle Tony. I'm really very sorry."

Uncle Tony and Joran looked round at the twins, both of them wearing baffled expressions, although it might be said that Uncle Tony's contained a little more self-interested fear. Jamey leaned forward and put a gentle hand on Uncle Tony's shoulder. "I'll tell Grandma Jackie what you were _really_ doing on your sixteenth birthday, Tony."

Uncle Tony looked alarmed. "It was only a pub!"

"But what was _in_ the pub, Tony?" Grace asked innocently. Uncle Tony's face flamed.

"You wouldn't _dare_," he said, in a shrill, pained voice.

"Maybe I'm not an expert," said Joran, "but the twins don't strike me as the kind of people you double-dog dare, Tony. Just get in the TARDIS."

Uncle Tony's eyes met his, desperate but almost resigned to his fate; he must have known what the outcome would be the moment he spotted the twins. The twins always got their way, one way or another. It was practically a law of nature, like gravity or mass. He shrugged past the twins, striking for a bright blue porta-potty across the street, parked beside a construction zone. He opened its door, gave London one last sorrowful look, and disappeared into the light spilling out onto the sidewalk.

"Bit dramatic, that one," said Joran.

"Yeah," agreed Grace. "He acts like we're going to get him killed or something."

Jamey grinned. "Well, he's not dead yet, is he?"

"He the clumsy sort?" asked Joran.

Grace gave the stars a considering glance. "More—magnetic, I think. Trouble finds him no matter where he's at."

"Not true," said Jamey. "He does well enough when we're not around."

"The pub," she pointed out.

"Well, yes. But that was partially our fault as well." Jamey turned to look at Joran was a peculiar sparkle in his eyes. "It would be more correct to say that trouble finds _us_ no matter where we are. Uncle Tony's simply rubbish at dealing with it, that's all."

"You _are_ trouble," said Joran, without a flicker of humor.

"Aw, that's sweet," Jamey said, laughing, and Grace gave Joran's forehead a merry kiss, as if he'd told her she was beautiful. They went off together towards the TARDIS, and Joran shouted after them with reddened cheeks, "That wasn't a bloody compliment!"

Simultaneously, as if they'd planned it, the twins lifted a finger in cheerful salute.

* * *

The twins ran together around the TARDIS's controls, grinning every now and then as if for the explicit purpose of interrupting their persistently intense expressions, while Joran and Uncle Tony, momentary allies, sat sullenly against the railings. They were both holding tight to the metal supports, to keep from being pitched every which way. ("Their father flies very similar," Uncle Tony confided to Joran, "but even he doesn't put you in danger of a concussion every time he fires the engines.") Joran had found in Uncle Tony a like-minded person, in that they both generally could not keep up with the twins, and therefore found them infuriating. The difference was that Joran could understand them, while Uncle Tony could not.

"It's all utterly baffling to me," said Uncle Tony, as Grace hauled on a gigantic handle, using her weight to swing it into the appropriate position. A second later the whole TARDIS pitched and rolled; she whooped, gave a laugh, and worked at something out of Joran's eyesight until the violent motions soothed into something a little easier. "It's as if they _thrive_ on misadventures. The more trouble they're in, the better. One Christmas they stole an entire ham, but when the thievery went unnoticed, they told everyone who'd listen what they'd done! It's all about attention, I tell you. Attention."

"How old were they?" asked Joran.

"Four," called Jamey. "But the story, I admit, is good for illustrative effect."

"It doesn't matter how old they were," Uncle Tony said stubbornly. "Just last month they died all my knickers pink. I was the laughing stock of my health club."

"Oh, please," said Jamey.

"It's true!" snapped Uncle Tony. "They think I'm gay!"

Grace grinned at them from around the time rotor, the fluctuating colors giving her an almost ghoulish air. "Darling, they thought that _long_ before the knickers bit."

Joran looked at Uncle Tony, and Uncle Tony looked back at Joran, until he caught on what the look was about, and said loudly, "I'm _not_! God in Heaven, I've _had_ girlfriends—"

"Not many, I'd think," said Joran, and on his way past, Jamey high-fived him. From then on out Uncle Tony sat a little farther away from Joran, and Joran began to see that despite his general qualms about the twins and their possible insanity, his sense of humor really did resign him to their company. (Ragging on poor Uncle Tony was too great a joke to be missed, whatever Joran thought about the twins. The man practically asked for it.)

After a few more mistakes, grumpy shouting, and whoops of ecstasy whenever the TARDIS gave an unpleasant jolt, the TARDIS landed. Jamey licked his finger and held it upward. "I do believe we've landed in the right spot this time," he said, and Grace gave him a one-armed hug around his middle. "We're getting better at this, Gracie."

"The right spot" was, in fact, another space port, but one that Joran was reasonably sure must still exist, because it was a suspended space port; it wasn't attached to anything, and was locked in place. If anyone had tried to take _it_, they'd have had to deal with the massless, immovable antimatter core, which being the heart of the port, made it impossible to move. Sure enough, when they opened the TARDIS doors, they found themselves looking out at a blaze of neon lights, the air full of shouting and singing and general merriment.

"Welcome to Lotar Substation Four, gents," said Joran. He paused, looking at Grace, who had her eyebrows raised, and added as an afterthought, "And lady."

"It looks like—New York," said Uncle Tony.

Joran grinned. "New York with aliens, maybe."

"New York has cars," Grace said dismissively. Uncle Tony rolled his eyes at her, but no one was paying any attention to him, and so no one cared. There was little point in doing a thing if no one was going to notice, especially a thing like rolling his eyes, which was done especially for an audience; so Uncle Tony subsided into a moody silence. No one took much notice of that, either.

"Hold on a minute," Joran said, in absolute astonishment. "All the signs are in English! How are they all in English? I was here only a few months ago, that one's supposed to be in Golgarian—"

Grace cleared her throat gently, and gave the TARDIS a general wave of her hand. Jamey coughed and said, "_Translation circuit_!"

"It can translate signs, too?" Joran said. His eyes were round. "That's remarkable!"

"It takes the fun out of it," muttered Uncle Tony. "Nothing looks foreign."

"You," said Grace, "can wait in the TARDIS, if you're going to be grumpy."

Uncle Tony glared at her.

"Buck up, Tony," said Jamey. "We'll buy you a drink. Onward ho, Joran, show us to the best pub!"

"Aye aye, cap'n," said Joran, which seemed to please Jamey to no end. Grace gave him a friendly pinch to the side to remind him what they were there for; they certainly hadn't stolen the TARDIS (again) only to fluff up Jamey's ego.

There were levels and levels of pubs, and while Joran had only been to a few of them, he'd heard his fair share of stories and knew exactly where to go. The drinks tasted like tar but burned a hole through your gut as well as your head, and all the best talk to be had, could be had there. It was called the Blue Marie and was run by a former human (human-Slitheen gene splicing—not pretty) down on the thirty-first level. They took a lift down, and Joran, who had had more than enough time to charge his pistol in the past few weeks, drew it off his belt holster and got it at the ready.

"Worried?" asked Jamey.

" 'Course not," Joran said, with a roguish grin. "This is precautionary. I dare you to go below level twenty-five without an armed escort, mate."

"Okay," said Jamey and Grace together, and the second the lift doors opened, walked straight out into the street. Joran and Uncle Tony stared after them with open mouths, Uncle Tony because a native of these scummy streets had clearly said not to, and Joran because he wished he'd have had the cojones to do it himself. After a second (and a few helpful "Please disembark" messages from the lift) Joran followed them, and Uncle Tony followed him, because he wasn't about to be left alone on a space port.

"Over there," Joran said, catching up with the twins, who were strolling unmolested through the streets. They were seen—they were definitely seen—but their confidence gave them protection they wouldn't have otherwise had, for while perhaps they did not know it, Joran was more than aware that young humans fetched a good price in the slave markets.

"Charming place," said Grace, taking in the filth-slimed walls, and heaps of trash. She gave Joran a twinkling smile. "Race you in!"

"Better not," said Joran. "You can't get in without a pass."

"Do you have such a pass?" asked Uncle Tony.

"Yep," said Joran, and led them inside. There was a short hallway, at the end of which was a door, and a very large, very burly-looking Judoon. The rhino-like guard had an elaborate tattoo across his neck that said he'd been a reject, a failed recruit, which to a Judoon was reasonable cause for suicide.

"Identify," said the Judoon.

"Lieutenant Joran," said Joran, "officer of the Second Earth Dynasty."

The Judoon's little eyes flexed a little. "Purpose?"

"I don't know why I should tell _you_."

"Purpose?" the Judoon asked again, louder, so Joran lifted his fist and punched the Judoon under the jaw, just where the stiff flesh turned soft. The Judoon roared, and kept roaring, all the way down to the ground, where he rolled and howled but did not get up.

"They're like trees," said Joran, to the very impressed twins, and flabbergasted Uncle Tony. "One good hit and down they go."

"I'll remember that," said Jamey; Joran rather suspected that he would, and might just be the one person in the universe, besides a soldier in the corps, who might actually use it.

They opened the door and went inside. The pub was quiet but undisturbed by the discontents of the downed Judoon. No one looked up at them, eyes all trained on their respective drinks. Even the bartender ignored them.

"Do you use your special pass now?" asked Uncle Tony.

Joran lifted his clenched fist. "This _is_ my special pass, mate!" Summoning up his bravado, Joran waltzed on up to the bar, slapped his hand down on the astrometal surface, and said in a voice filled with swagger, "A gligolozine and three waters, barkeep, if you please."

That got their attention. The bartender craned his head around to look at him before turning the rest of his body, little deep-blue eyes rotating keenly. The rest of the pub was now sneaking glances, looking them up and down, taking note of their weaponry. "Oh?" asked the bartender. "Which one of you's the metahuman, then?"

"That'd be me," said Joran. "Lieutenant Joran, Attack Class."

The air stilled, and no one was making any bones about staring anymore. The bartender drew up out of his slouch. "My apologies, sir. A gligolozine and three waters, right away, sir."

"Ooh," whispered Grace, as the bartender hurried off. "You're _intimidating_, are you?"

"To most people, yeah," said Joran.

"Interesting," said Jamey. Uncle Tony, of course, looked horrified. Joran felt something like resignation creeping into his belly. He'd harbored some small hope that this little show of his would give him a point or two over the twins, but no, here they were, as unflappably alien as ever. It was possible they didn't know what a lieutenant of the Attack Class did, but something told Joran that they'd had a pretty good idea from the first moment they'd met him.

The bartender came back with their drinks, and they all took a seat along the bar, squished in among aliens and humanoids and humans. Joran toasted them all and downed the gligolozine in a single gulp.

"Looks fun," commented Jamey. "What is it?"

"Not for you, mate," said Joran. A familiar warmth was seeping into his body, and already he could feel his awareness growing. "This'd kill you."

"Doubtful," said Uncle Tony, with an expression that said he had experience to back it up.

"This isn't a bad day, this is poison," insisted Joran. "If you're not a metahuman, you can't metabolize it. It attacks your system. It's fatal to almost every species in the universe."

"What is a metahuman, anyway?" asked Grace.

"Nothing good, sweetheart," an orange-skinned man on her other side said. His voice was like gravel, crackling and scratching between vowels. "Metahumans are soldiers. The perfect soldiers, some say."

"We die," said Joran. "Perfect soldiers wouldn't die."

"They're stronger, faster," continued the stranger. "Damned near impossible to best in a fight, that's for sure. And most of them are limited precogs. They see two to three seconds into the future."

"Just enough to give us an edge against the enemy," said Joran. "You know us pretty well. Were you in the corps?"

The orange man raised his glass in a salute. "Civilian consultant, at your service. I helped design your materialization gear."

"You wouldn't happen to have any nutritional patterns, would you?"

"No, sorry," he said, with a shake of his head. "After they found out that I—disapproved—of the metahuman project, I was stripped of my possessions and sent off with my tail between my legs." They all peeked surreptitiously round at his bottom, so he added, "Metaphorically speaking."

Joran was disappointed. "I can never remember to download nutritional patterns. It's always new guns, new ammo, new this, new that—never nutritional patterns! It's almost been the death of me, I tell you."

"I sympathize," said the orange-man, and sounded as if he meant it. "I'm Soreg. What brings you all to Lotar Substation Four?"

"We're only here because of Sub-Nine," said Joran. "That's our usual spot."

Soreg gave a tired nod. "Ah, yes. The vanishing space port. I heard about that."

"Shame, that," said Jamey, copying Joran's easy cadence perfectly. "Couldn't have been scheduled for demolition, could it?"

"Never," said Soreg. "It simply vanished. It's a great mystery." He leaned in close, until they could smell his breath, an awkward comingling fish eggs and honeysuckle. "I'll tell you what else, soldier: more than space ports are disappearing. People, ships, asteroids! You name it, it's vanished. I'm half-expecting the pub itself to pop into nothing."

"It'd take a lot of energy to do a thing like that," said Grace.

"Right you are, miss," agreed Soreg. "More energy than anyone _I_ know would have access to."

"I have a bad feeling about this," said Uncle Tony, and though Joran was expecting a joke in reply, Jamey said seriously, "Me as well, Tony. Me as well."

They had a few more drinks with Soreg, who devolved into grand wartime stories, which the twins were delighted by. Joran stocked up on gligolozine, as it was unlikely that he'd see another space port for quite some time, and Uncle Tony upgraded from water to something called Thor's Whiskey, which turned out to be green and viscous and had him singing sea shanties after a single sip.

This was, in their end, their excuse to leave, and they hauled Uncle Tony up by his belt, and led him past the Judoon, who still hadn't gotten back to his feet. It was only once they were back on the lift that they spoke.

"I can imagine scrapping together the energy to zap a space port," said Grace, in a low voice, just in case there were listening devices in the lift, "but ships? Asteroids?"

"It's a consistent power source," Jamey agreed. "It'd have to be."

"Enemies!" Uncle Tony brayed. "_Enemies everywhere_!"

"No," said Jamey, thoughtfully. He looked over Uncle Tony's arm, which was draped round his neck, at his sister. "That much power isn't easy to come by."

She didn't answer, just waited for him to finish his thought.

"How many things, realistically, could generate enough energy to pull it off?" he continued. "A rift? A star?"

"It would depend on whether they're being dematerialized or transported," said Grace. "If the mechanics of the thing is right, transportation is mostly a question of doorways—how big they are, how long they stay open, and so on. But dematerialization?"

"Separation atom by atom," said Jamey. "Yes."

"Or," she said. "The _kind_ of transportation."

They looked at one another.

"Not interplanetary," said Jamey.

"No," said Grace.

"Time travel, then, or—"

Grace was already shaking her head. "The TARDIS would have picked up evidence of time travel. You remember Dad's stories, the disappearing planets—he's already programmed that data into the TARDIS. It would know."

"So we have two options, then," said Jamey. "Either someone's going about disintegrating the biggest objects they can find, or these things are being transported across the Divide."

"The Divide?" asked Joran.

Grace gave a slow nod. "Yeah, the Divide—the Divide between universes."

"And by universe you mean—"

"Realities," said Jamey. "We mean realities."


	3. Of Hungry Eyes

Someone asked what might be coming up, and whether or not that might include River Song, to which I have to say this: River Song is a perplexing character, and sometimes I love her, and sometimes I hate her. That said, I find nothing in her I'd want to write about, which means while I love her story and admire the character, that's all Moffat's game, and I ain't touching it for the world. (Just watch, now that I've gone and said that, I'll write something about her.) At least in this story, I have no plans for River Song to (ever) appear.

Also, thank you to everyone who's reviewed! I'm very grateful :) It's like Christmas, checking my email and seeing "FF Review Alert"!

Housekeeping, fini. So now... geronimo!

* * *

"We need to go back to Sub-Nine," said Grace, walking brusquely back towards the TARDIS, which was parked between buildings in the shape of a cleansing booth, a big metal box into which you could go to purge alcohol (and other things) from your bloodstream before reporting for duty. There was a haggard old man trying feebly to open the door, to no avail. "Down for repairs, gramps," Grace told him, and waited until he was gone to continue, "If they're breaching the Divide, we might be able to pick up the residue. We'll need to run full scans, go over everything with a fine-toothed comb."

"You're not thinking of bringing this to Dad?" demanded Jamey.

Grace quirked an eyebrow. "At least not until we have all the information."

"How do you know this has anything to do with the Divide?" asked Joran, holding open the door for them while they lugged Uncle Tony inside. "I mean, you said it could be—what was it—the Void?"

"Not much of a difference," said Jamey. He sounded the slightest bit out of breath, and abruptly let go of Uncle Tony, allowing him to slip, like a boneless sack of meat, to the floor. "Teensy-weensy. It's easiest to cross between universes where the edges nearly meet—only just nearly, because if they ever did meet, there'd be—well, nothing. They'd cancel each other out. Anyway. My point is that while they're almost touching, they're not, and for every trip, you pass through a small section of the Void."

Uncle Tony gave a little chirruping giggle from the floor. "Like a _river_," he burbled. "Is like a river … like crossing a river … big fat river—"

"Well, yes," said Grace. "A river of nothingness, I suppose. You'd naturally try to cross at the narrowest place."

"That's all very well and good," said Joran impatiently, "but how do you _know_? Couldn't it still be disintegration, a weapon?"

"Of course it could," she said, on her way up to the controls to help Jamey, who was already starting the engines. "It could be anything. It could be massive talking hamburgers with the powers of gods, for all we know. But we have a hunch and our hunches are usually very good."

"Please note for the sake of our reputations that we _are_ going back to Sub-Nine to make sure," pointed out Jamey, as Grace slammed the heel of her palm onto something on the controls. The TARDIS's engines moaned into life.

"With drunken Uncle Tony," said Joran.

"Yes! Exactly," Jamey cried, but then amended hastily, "But leave off the drunken bit. He's not much of a chaperone if he's blubbering on the floor, now is he?"

"You don't seriously think your father will believe that Uncle Tony came along to supervise?" asked Joran, leaving Uncle Tony where he lay in order to take hold of the railings. Uncle Tony went sliding off to the other side of the TARDIS, but he giggled the whole way, and Joran really couldn't feel bad about letting him loose when he was so clearly enjoying himself.

"Of course not," said Grace. "But the effort will count for something. Land ho!"

"Parking brake!" shouted Jamey, and at the last second Grace grabbed it; they landed without even the characteristic whining of the TARDIS's engines, as smoothly and gently as if they were in a hover car. Joran applauded politely, and the twins took identical bows at either end of the circular controls.

"Start the scans," Grace said to Jamey. "I'll go out and see what I can't find. Joran, watch Uncle Tony."

"Not a chance," said Joran, and followed her out the door.

* * *

"_Run_!" Grace shouted, bolting down from the cliff face at full speed. Joran stared upward with an open mouth, frozen to the spot. There was an eye on the asteroid. A big, dark, empty _eye_. Or at least, it was eye-shaped. Really it just looked like a blotch of pure nothing, where no light could ever penetrate. Grace skipped back a few steps, aimed her stolen sonic screwdriver, and turned it on.

Something from within the eye screamed.

"What in the name of the gods—" began Joran, reaching upward to cross his heart in the symbol of the High Earth gods. There was a terrible screech, like metal being shredded, and the eye began, slowly, to close.

"C'mon!" yelled Grace, grabbing Joran by the arm, and she dragged him bodily away from the eye.

"How did you—"

"I fed it matter," she said, panting a little as they ran. Behind them, the screams were getting louder. "Atoms. Things. Should be escalating to boulders now. Once I get to the TARDIS we can sink the asteroid in it."

"_Why_—" Joran began, horrified, and Grace gave him a violent shove.

"Just trust me, you git!" she yelled at him. "Now _run_!"

They ran. The dirt beneath their feet was rolling steadily back the way they'd come, drawn into the deep black eye. Joran felt as if a bit of him had died, like he'd been poisoned, for looking into the thing. It was evil, of that he was sure.

Before them was the TARDIS, sitting peacefully beside a boulder. The boulder began to tremble—then to roll—and then it was wrenched into the air, zipping toward them at a terrible speed. Joran and Grace flung themselves to the ground and the boulder went safely over them, but a wave of space muck was right behind it, and it was all they could do to avoid it. They leapt and dodged and as Grace began to tire Joran took her by the waist and hauled her alongside him, dragging her through the flying debris. The TARDIS was trembling by the time they reached it, resisting the pull, but only just.

"Fly!" Grace shouted, the second they were inside. "Up, up, up!"

Jamey didn't have to be told twice. Up they went, until the shaking stopped. Grace leaned heavily against the controls and flipped switches and turned knobs until the thing was done. Jamey struck a blue button, and against the wall the viewer lit, showing them the scene below. There was a little black pinprick, a pinprick which was twenty feet across if you were standing just beside it, and into it the asteroid was going, ripped up and sucked in.

"The breach is sealing," reported Jamey, looking down at the scanner. "Just a little more matter—"

The pinprick shrank and then it disappeared, and all around where it had been was a mutilated and fragmented asteroid, already breaking apart. Grace sank to the floor, and Joran sat beside her, both of them wheezing and coughing from the amount of asteroid dust in their lungs.

"A near thing," said Joran, with a grin, and Grace gave him a friendly punch in the arm.

Jamey monkeyed with the controls for a bit longer, though they didn't really need too much watching at this point. Eventually he came round to the other side of the controls and crouched beside his sister, running his eyes over her, stopping at every scratch and bruise until he was satisfied that she was all right. She looked up at him without moving. After the scrutiny was over, he lifted a finger and tapped her between the eyes. That was all. Neither of them spoke. Grace went back to looking tired and Joran went back to flying the TARDIS.

"You all right?" Joran asked, unsure what to make of the scene he'd just witnessed. (Was a tap on the noggin the twins' version of a hug, then? But no—they'd hugged before. They were the hugging sort. Joran was perplexed.) Grace gave him a little nod.

"What about you?" she asked. "You took the brunt of it."

"Five minutes and it'll be like it never happened," he replied, and lifted his uniform jacket to show her bruises already fading. "Metahuman, remember?"

"Right," said Grace. Her eyes were twinkling. "Forgot you were special."

Joran pursed his lips at her and tugged his jacket back into place. "No one likes a smart mouth, Grace Smith."

She grinned at him. "Nor a show-off, Lieutenant Joran."

* * *

Although returning to Earth to tell the Doctor that his TARDIS and sonic screwdriver had been stolen (again) to do something dangerous (again) had ended in disaster (again—sort of) was not high on anyone's list, the TARDIS was nonetheless pointed homeward, and let loose. No one seemed to mind much at what speed she flew. It was enough that they were going.

Joran was rather dreading the whole thing, because the twins were odd ducks but he'd gotten over it, while their father was simply terrifying, and never once descended into anything more appetizing. He was forever and eternally the Doctor, an entity which Joran regarded with persistent fear, and would have gladly walked into the dark eye to avoid.

Well. Maybe not. He was metahuman, after all. Surely he, if anyone, could handle the Doctor. (This was a lie.)

Uncle Tony was hauled off to sick bay to recover from his experiment with Thor's Whiskey. The twins probably would have left him grinning on the floor for as long as he liked if it wouldn't have gotten them in even more trouble than they were already in, and so this brief spasm of altruism was actually something more akin to self-interest. Joran didn't blame them, and neither did Uncle Tony, once he stopped calling the light bulbs "sir". The Doctor probably would have flayed them _all_ alive, for letting Uncle Tony drink such rubbish, and Uncle Tony would be flayed for drinking it at all. At least with Uncle Tony sober, only the twins would be in immediate danger.

The TARDIS landed—smoothly, like before—and the twins stood together, looking down at the doors. They stood close enough that their shoulders touched, and their elbows too. Joran and Uncle Tony, still gripping the railings, watched them curiously. What were they waiting for?

A second later the doors to the TARDIS burst open, and standing in its outline was the Doctor, standing just far enough back to show them that he'd opened the door without touching it. It was a magical sort of thing. The Doctor's dark eyes swept over them, and then over the TARDIS, before coming to a rest on the twins.

"Well," he said, instead of yelling, which Joran had been fully expecting. "Best tell me everything before your mother gets home."

The twins both began talking at once, making it impossible to understand them, but the Doctor simply stood where he was and listened. His head was tilted a precise ten degrees, and his chin rested on his hand, and his eyes narrowed into intense points of concentration, until Joran thought he resembled a satellite dish, positioned for optimal data retrieval.

Eventually the twins stopped, either because they ran out of things to say (doubtful) or because they ran out of breath (more likely), and the Doctor said, "It's not a thing from another universe."

He said it with such assurance that Joran believed him.

"What do you mean?" asked Grace.

"I've been in the universe beside ours," he said. "I was there for the better part of nine hundred years. I've seen my fair share of things, and I'm telling you, it's not from there."

"So it's from here," said Jamey.

The Doctor gave a slow shake of his head. It was Grace who said aloud, realizing, "The Void!"

"Bingo," said the Doctor.

"The Void is nothing," Uncle Tony said tiredly, and everyone looked at him. Both of the twins had their eyebrows raised. "There's nothing _in_ it."

"There's not _supposed_ to be anything in it," the Doctor corrected. "But things—ships, people—have gone into the Void and survived there. Whether or not they went mad, well, that's another question. But it's possible to shield yourself long enough to live. The Void hasn't exactly been _explored_, so really, who can say one thing or the other, but if something that exists, that has mass and energy, can exist in the Void, then perhaps the Void is not entirely what we imagined it to be."

"We?" asked Joran.

"The Time Lords," answered the Doctor. "The Void is the name we gave to it."

Joran felt a little chill at that. As if this man wasn't _already_ intimidating.

"Whether it is something in the Void or the Void itself," continued the Doctor, once it was clear that Joran wasn't going to say anything (what _could_ one say to that? Cool? Nice work? Great creativity?) "things are being eaten, and they're being eaten for a reason."

"Eaten?" repeated Grace. "Not sucked in?"

The Doctor waggled his eyebrows at her.

Jamey tried it on for size. "Eaten—eaten. Like a living thing. Like—"

"Like maybe," interrupted the Doctor, glancing at a watch that wasn't on his wrist, "your mother will be here any minute with the groceries, and _someone's_ going to have to go find out why the Void is hungry."

He turned and took too long steps out, all that was needed to take him back into his garage, where he turned his head to the side and added, "And this time, _avoid_ the breaches, if you please. Your mother would kill me if you were eaten."

The twins looked at one another. "Aren't you worried about them?" asked Joran, with his usual tact.

"Worried?" repeated the Doctor, slowly closing the TARDIS's doors. "Of course I'm worried, what sort of father do you take me for? I know my children, Lieutenant Joran, and they're just going to do it anyway, whether or not I make a big fuss—so really, why waste the energy?"

The Doctor winked at them, and shut the doors, but just before they shut completely, when the Doctor thought no one was looking, Joran saw his expression slip into something dark, drawn, and intense. Joran felt a little wiggle of fear grow up his spine. The Doctor knew more than he was letting on, Joran thought, knew enough to be afraid of what was in the Void.

They were about to set off when the doors opened again, and the Doctor stuck his head in. "Actually," he said, trying to smile, "just take some readings, scout things out. No adventures. I'm serious—this is too big for you."

"Yes, Dad," chorused the twins, not meaning a word of it, and with one last lingering glance, the Doctor disappeared again.

"Does this mean I can't go home yet?" Uncle Tony complained.


	4. The Lady Moijra

Another chapter at ... nearly midnight. xD I really need to stop saying up ridiculously late to write these. It's no wonder I'm sick. In any case, behold chapter four, containing the vicious vixens of Bebenzar! :)

* * *

The TARDIS flew, and kept flying, until it picked up another reading similar to the one they had encountered on Sub-Nine, and it was in this fashion that they landed on Bebenzar. Bebenzar was a planet not far from Joran's home system, but small; it was the last stop on a trade route that went through the Outer Reaches, a section of space that boasted only minor asteroids and dust. On the other side of the Outer Reaches were more heavily populated areas of the universe, and good for trading, and so Bebenzar, while small, and generally uninteresting, boasted a fair amount of traffic.

"So," said Jamey, leaning against the TARDIS's doorway and looking out at the planet below. "Bebenzar. Any ideas, lieutenant?"

Joran raised his eyebrows. "What sort of ideas?"

"Well, intel, of course." Jamey gestured vaguely downward. "We might be able to find the breach, and that's all well and good, but we need to know when it got there, and what it's sucked it. Therefore—if you follow—we must talk to someone."

"Mm," agreed Joran. "I know just the place."

Jamey's lips twisted into a smile. "Thought you might."

* * *

_No Females Allowed_.

"Really?" said Grace. "_Really_?"

"I told you to stay in the TARDIS," Joran pointed out, which did very little to help Grace's temper. "There's a few pubs for foreigners in the main city, but if you want to know what's what, you come here. And here, females don't go to pubs. Ever. It's the law."

"Damn the law!" declared Grace, but her brother gave her a look, and after another moment or two of stubborn frustration, she stomped back towards the TARDIS. Uncle Tony watched her go with a frown.

"Why is it always pubs?" he asked, when she was gone. "Could we be truly daring and go to a café?" He gave Joran a suspicious look. "Have you ever _been_ to a café on this planet?"

"I'm not entirely sure if they have any," admitted Joran.

"Do you _live_ in pubs?" demanded Uncle Tony, scandalized, and when Joran flushed self-consciously Jamey gave his shoulder a firm smack and said, "Not a bad life, mate. Not a bad life at all."

"Wait till you see the inside of _this_ one," said Joran. "It's one of my favorites."

"Lead on," said Jamey, and as Joran stepped off, Jamey snagged Uncle Tony and said in his ear, "Be _nice_!"

"A pub!" responded Uncle Tony, with his most indignant expression. Jamey rolled his eyes.

The inside of the pub—which was nameless, and looked like a warehouse from the outside—was lit up with lights from every corner, and flooded with people. Music thrummed in the background, and free drinks went round on little motorized trays that floated handily at waist level.

The boys stood shoulder-to-shoulder, looking out over the pub. "Blimey," said Uncle Tony.

"Told you," said Joran. There was no small amount of pride in his voice. "Now get out there and mingle. Find a local girl—they'll be the ones with the violet eyes and squashed noses—and get her talking. All right?"

"Local girl?" asked Uncle Tony. "I thought there weren't any females allowed!"

"Foreign," said Jamey. "_Foreign_ females, Tony."

Uncle Tony's face grew red. "Preposterous!"

"Glad you think so," said Joran. He gave Uncle Tony a friendly shove. "Now _mingle_!"

They watched him go with big grins on their faces. Jamey leaned in and said, "He won't pick up a single one. He's hopeless with women."

"And that's his own species!" said Joran, and they both laughed. As they laughed more than one person turned to watch them, and among them was the Lady Moijra. Moijra was standing to the side, in a position that telegraphed very clearly just how much she wished to be left alone, because Moijra selected her own victims. So to speak. She sipped at her Coridian ale and swept her eyes up one and down the other, considering.

They were of a similar height, which was always appealing; one was dark and one was blond, one strong and the other skinny, but both—this was what was really important—were handsome. They were handsome in a very dazzlingly human sort of way, so different from the unchanging brand of beauty that her menfolk possessed. Her decision was made. They were too pretty to pass up, and if she waited too long, someone might scoop them up.

Moijra came away from the wall and paced towards them with even, measured steps that swung her hips just so, and both men, she was pleased to see, turned their heads to watch. She smiled at them, showing her angular Bebenza teeth. "Welcome to Bebenzar," she purred, allowing her native growl to come through and accent her words. "You're newcomers, yes?"

"Just this one," said Joran, giving Jamey's shoulder a pat. "He wanted to see the women of Bebenzar for himself."

"Joran's told great stories about this place," Jamey agreed, though Joran had done no such thing. Moijra's painted eyebrows rose gently.

"You've never had the joy of a Bebenza woman's company?" she asked, and Jamey shook his head. She moved between them, putting one arm around Joran's waist, and one arm around Jamey's. "Oh, my darling, we shall rectify that. We most certainly shall."

Jamey gave her a look that warmed her to her toes. "Much obliged," he said, and sounded as if he meant it. Moijra's smile turned genuine; she had selected well. The Duchess Fefera would be madly jealous before the night was through!

* * *

In the back of the nameless club, behind a series of genetically encoded doors, there was a lounge set up for Bebenzar's elite. It was planetary law that the noble families be given an area separate from that of the commoners, no matter how base the establishment, but this was far and beyond a table set aside. It was a cavernous room, filled with couches and tables and servants. There was nothing that was not embellished, no single thing that did not speak of grandeur. The ceilings went upward to an impossible peak, without any visible supports, and in the empty air between it and the floor were a thousand glittering dancers, weaving in a sedate pattern, back and forth. From the dancers floated little particles of light that faded just before they touched the heads of the royalty below.

"Beautiful, is it not?" said Moijra, her arms looped through that of her guests. Jamey and Joran tried not to look too impressed, but neither of them succeeded. Moijra smiled. "Come along, boys. I want you to meet the girls."

Stretching out her gait to make the best of her slinky gown, long toes outstretched, Moijra glided her way to the center of the room, where a circle of women had gathered. They were all talking quietly amongst themselves, but it was not hard to overhear them, even from a distance; all around them the people were silent, mouths clamped tightly shut, in deference to the women in the circle, none of whom were lower than a duchess.

One of the women turned to watch Moijra's advance, and cried, "Lady Moijra! You've come at last—with guests, I see!"

"Your Grace," said Moijra, and bowed her head, though by rights she should have bowed. It was a mark of her personal influence that the duchess did not seem to care. "Duchess Fefera of the Dousal Province, I present to you my guests, the Honorable James Smith of Earth, and his companion, Lieutenant Joran of the Soladan Quadrant, Alpha Colony of the Second Earth Dynasty."

"Quite a mouthful," commented the duchess. "The Alpha Colony, you say?"

Moijra bowed her head.

"That would make you—" the duchess began.

"—metahuman, yes, Your Grace," finished Joran. She seemed surprised by his daring.

"How impressive," she said. She turned to Jamey. "And what are you? Pure human stock?"

Moijra turned to look at Jamey, one eyebrow quirked. It was a question he had refused to answer, when she'd asked, in order to properly introduce him. Jamey nodded to the duchess, looked at the first fold of her skirt, just below the line of her waist. "You've a scanner there," he said. "You know by now that I'm not."

"Very good," said the duchess, with a winning smile. "You're a quick one. You're right, I've a scanner; but it's telling me now that it doesn't know what you are, only that there's human in you."

"I'm of a race too old to be remembered here," Jamey said cryptically, and that was when Joran realized that Jamey was playing it up. The boy was a natural. They needed Moijra's help, and Moijra wanted to get into the circle; to get into the circle, they had to impress the duchess, and unless they reached the circle, Moijra would never feel obligated to help them. He almost wanted to shake his hand.

"Mysterious!" exclaimed the duchess. "Tell me more."

"I couldn't—my sacred oaths prevent me," Jamey said, closing his eyes briefly in affected sorrow.

"Sacred oaths?" another woman asked. Joran could see by the tattooed rings around one of her fingers that she was a princess, fifth in line to the throne. "To hell with sacred oaths, I say! What oaths are these? What are you talking about so secretively?"

"Lady Moijra's escort for the evening," replied the duchess, and a moment later they were in the circle, and the most powerful women of Bebenzar were all excitedly trying to guess what it was that diluted Jamey's human blood. In the midst of all this, there was another entrance to the circle: a duchess with a Uncle Tony in tow.

"Hello," he said vaguely. "I'm Tony, and I'm an architect."

There were screams of delight. Apparently, they hadn't had a human architect—at least, one native to Earth—in several centuries. Joran and Jamey watched with identically incredulous looks as all of the women left them to go to Uncle Tony, giggling and shrieking and fawning all over him.

"In what universe does an architect outrank a dashing metahuman soldier?" demanded Joran.

"In what universe does an architect outrank a handsome, uber-mysterious alien of an unknown ancient race?" countered Jamey. Joran had to concede the point, but aiming not to lose any ground, he said, "James? Really?"

"James is a perfectly good name," said Jamey, with some heat.

Joran nodded sagely. "Of course it is. Perfectly good." He paused. "So why do you go by Jamey, again?"

Jamey deigned not to answer. He was pretending to watch Uncle Tony, who was bearing all the attention with a kind of English stoicism that had his face pulling resolutely downward. The expression was hardly attractive, but the women of Bebenzar seemed to find it adorable, and couldn't stop patting his cheeks. "You think he'll remember to get the information we need?" Jamey asked.

"Tony's a big boy, he can handle it," said Joran. "In the meantime, how about we see what we can scrounge up in the way of drinks?"

"I knew I liked you for a reason," said Jamey, dark eyes twinkling. They waved cheerily at Uncle Tony, who glared at them, and slipped away into the crowd.

* * *

Several hours later, Joran and Jamey were sitting along a great orange couch, sipping at little blue drinks that tasted like mango but smelled like banana. They had agreed, by this point, to talk to absolutely no one except each other. This was really just for safety's sake, because Bebenza women were volatile things, especially when turned down ("I'm only seventeen!" protested a shocked Jamey. "Really, that isn't legal where I'm from!") There had been fisticuffs, thrown drinks, and all kinds of inadvisable behavior. As the evening slowed, and the room began to empty, the offers lessened in kind, until Joran and Jamey were at long last left in peace.

"So there I am," Joran was saying, "balancing on the _wire_, and would you believe it, my pistol wouldn't fire?"

"No!" exclaimed Jamey.

"_Yes_!" Joran cried. "I couldn't believe it! I'm practically an inch from death and the bloody thing won't fire! So what do I do? I chuck a _rock_ at it!"

Jamey stared at him, wide-eyed, and a second later they both burst out laughing, and kept laughing until tears streaked down their cheeks and their drinks slopped everywhere, because really, the idea of throwing a rock at a charging riplotepedron was preposterous. It was something akin to stopping a landslide with an umbrella.

"Glad to see we're all having fun," Uncle Tony's voice said from above their heads, and they looked guiltily up at him. He had someone's cloak draped over one shoulder, and there was a smear of lipstick along one cheek that looked weird instead of rakish. The expression on his face was thunderous.

"We were just having a few drinks," said Jamey, fiddling with his glass. "And waiting for you. Obviously. It was miserable, Tony, really it was—"

"_Uncle_," hissed Uncle Tony, and Jamey's mouth snapped shut. "That is _Uncle_ Tony to you, boy. Now get me out of here before they come back from the powder room!"

Joran leapt to his feet, and the glass on his knee went clattering to the ground. Everyone looked up, including the cluster of finely dressed women just emerging from the bathroom. "Run!" yelled Jamey, and they all bolted. Although Uncle Tony typically moved at a turtle's pace, no matter what the occasion, he was truly moving now, streaking out of the hall and back into the commoner section of the pub at lightning speeds. Joran and Jamey had difficulty catching up to him.

Lady Moijra, standing by the door, watched them go with a little puzzled line between her brows, and after a moment's contemplation, followed.

* * *

"What did you _do_ to him?" Grace demanded, standing beside Uncle Tony, who was in one of the TARDIS's many bathrooms, scrubbing viciously at his cheek with a wet hand towel.

"_We_ didn't do anything," said Jamey. "It was the enemy, Gracie. Uncle Tony went in alone, a single man, on a mission for the greater good, it was bravery like you've never seen before—"

"Shut it, he was surrounded by women," interrupted Joran. "Best night of his life, probably."

"I have a _girlfriend_, you gits!" Uncle Tony shouted suddenly. The twins looked absolutely flabbergasted.

"A what?" asked Jamey.

"A _girlfriend_," repeated Uncle Tony, glaring at him in the mirror. "What I did in there was—was—was treasonous!"

"Oh, shush, don't be dramatic," said Grace. "I'm sure she'd understand that you did it for the good of the universe. Besides, no one's going to tell her. Right?" She was looking at Jamey, who had indeed been thinking along similar lines.

"Right," said Jamey. "Cross our hearts, and all that." Joran, for illustrative effect, pressed his hand dramatically to his heart.

"I want your _word_, James Smith," said Uncle Tony, and stretched out his hand. "The son of the Doctor would never go back on his word."

Very suddenly the atmosphere in the bathroom darkened, due in no small part to the expression on Jamey's face. The angle of his brown eyes, tensed into a narrow glare, was precisely the same, in every way, to the Doctor's. Joran felt he had enough expertise on the subject to be saying so with the utmost confidence. Jamey did not look seventeen anymore; he looked much older, ancient even.

"I swear it," said Jamey, and shook Uncle Tony's hand. Then he cheerfully boxed his uncle's ears, and said over Uncle Tony's yowls, "But don't put it to the test, Tony, or I'll make your life a living hell!"

He went jauntily out of the bathroom. Uncle Tony bellowed after him, "It's already a living hell! How could you _possibly_ make it worse?"

Jamey's spiky blond head poked back into the doorway, eyebrows raised, and Uncle Tony said sullenly, "Don't answer that."

* * *

Once everyone had settled (and Uncle Tony had washed off the last of the lipstick) they all gathered in the control room to hear what intel Uncle Tony had gathered. Uncle Tony was opening his mouth to begin, but every time he did, a knock sounded. He'd open his mouth—knock!—and then wait, suspicious. Open went his mouth—and knock!

"_Really_!" exclaimed Uncle Tony, so angry his cheeks turned red. Grace, suppressing a giggle, went to go see what was the matter. She opened the door and looked at the woman standing there, eyebrows raised.

"This says Nutritional Waste on it," the woman informed her.

"Yes," agreed Grace. She patted the dark blue finish. "It's because it's blue."

"That's ridiculous."

"So're those eyebrows. How long did it take to paint them in?"

The woman puffed up, violet eyes enraged, but all Grace did was laugh at her. She was standing inside a time machine, protected by ancient and powerful technology, as well as a handful of big strapping young men, all of whom were good in a pinch. (Uncle Tony was debatable, as his brawling technique consisted mostly of flailing and pulling hair, but Grace knew from personal experience that it could be wickedly effective.)

"Some friends of mine went in," said the woman, with as much dignity she could muster after having had her eyebrows scandalously insulted. "I'd like to speak with them, please."

"Oh, she's a proper one," said Grace, to the boys inside. "Thinks she's quite something."

"Tell them that it is the Lady Moijra," added the woman, clearly expecting Grace to be impressed, but all Grace did was snicker and say, "And she's a _lady_!"

Needless to say, it was not quite the reception Moijra had been expecting.

"Aw, no sour faces, I didn't mean it," Grace said cheerfully. "Unless it was the bit about the eyebrows, in which case, I meant it whole-heartedly. They are _spectacular_."

"If you were a citizen of Bebenzar," Moijra said, "I would have you whipped."

"With cream, please," said Grace, just as Jamey came to the door.

"Whipping my sister is not the best way to start a relationship, Moijra," Jamey purred, sending the frazzled lady a smile. The effect was somewhat lessened by Grace rolling her eyes. "What can I do for you?"

"I overheard the duchess and the others talking to the architect about the hole in the world," Moijra said. "I watched you leave, you took the architect with you."

"We might've," said Jamey.

"I _saw_ you!" she insisted. "Why were you asking about the hole? Do you know what it is? Can you fix what was done?"

Grace and Jamey exchanged a look.

"I understand that you didn't go there just to drink," Moijra said, eyes moving between Jamey and Grace, back and forth and back again, like she was worried they'd shut the door in her face. "I think you came to learn things. I just want to know if you can help."

"Do you know where it is?" asked Grace, in a much different voice than the one she'd been using before. Moijra hardly recognized her as the same person.

"Of course I know," said Moijra. "It opened where my estate used to be."


	5. Mother May I

I'm dissatisfied with the whole chapter. I'd be tempted to scrap the lot of it if it weren't for the fact that I said everything I meant to say, and I'm not entirely sure if I could say it better if I did it all over again. I think I'm going to take a bit of a break (which for me, means a day or two) and let things kind of ... marinate. I'm not letting the ideas grow up before I'm spitting them back out again, and I don't think it's doing much good. Tell me what you think, and don't be sparing!

Knowing me, I say I'll take a break, and then I won't. xD We'll see, I guess.

* * *

"You're worried," said Rose, sitting across from her husband. He would not answer her, only looked out the window, gazing at the noonday sky. Rose's finger tapped gently against the side of her teacup. "How dangerous is it?"

"Someone is punching holes in the universe," said the Doctor. "It is hardly _benign_."

Rose's eyebrows rose slowly, and the Doctor's eyes dropped to the table, the closest he would come—at least today—to an apology. "But that's not all they're doing, is it," Rose pointed out. "Things are being eaten as well."

The Doctor gave a brief nod.

"You know what it is?"

His lips stayed pressed together, and his eyes turned once more to the sky above them. The grey cast put a shine across his brown eyes that hid, just a bit, the fear that was beginning to show. Rose waited, watching him until her tea was cold, and then a little longer still, but he didn't answer her, and wasn't going to. She'd thought they'd moved beyond secrets by now.

Rose came slowly to her feet and set her half-empty cup down with a thump, spilling cold tea onto the tabletop. The Doctor's eyes moved slowly to watch the liquid slide across the wood. "You fetch my children," said Rose. "You fetch them right now."

* * *

"Blimey!" said Grace, crouched some ten feet from the edge of the massive dark hole. It was eye-shaped, like the first, but this one was ragged and broken, as if something had been taking great big bites out of the edges. She lifted the sonic screwdriver and fiddled with it a bit, aimed it, and turned it on just long enough to get a reading. She squinted at the readout. Curious. She tried the whole process again, with the same results. "Blimey!" she repeated, and shook her head.

"What is it?" asked Jamey, standing a few feet behind her. None of the others had dared come so close, not even Joran, who on the way over had been boasting to Moijra about the medals he'd won for courage under fire.

"Well, it doesn't exist, for one," said Grace. She stood and walked back towards Jamey, to show him what the sonic screwdriver had picked up. "We can see it, but it's not _there_."

"What's this, then?" asked Jamey, perplexed.

"It's the reading from the _center_ of the hole." Grace pointed out to where she meant, at the very heart of the darkness. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was matter."

"It doesn't read like matter," said Jamey. "Blimey! I don't even know what you'd call it."

Grace nodded. "My point exactly."

"What is it?" Joran shouted, so far back that he couldn't hear them talking, even with his standard-issue cochlea implant. The twins ignored him.

"We can at least agree that it's tangible," said Grace, as if Joran hadn't spoken. "It has a physical presence."

"Okay," agreed Jamey.

"The basic structure is—odd—but not that far gone from your basic molecule."

"Right."

"So what we have is a few molecules, suspended within a breach of the Void," she said, beginning to pace as she talked. "Molecules which would not occur naturally."

"Or _should_ not," corrected Jamey, watching her pace. "There are ways to manipulate molecular structures."

"But to manipulate them like this?" Jamey was silent. "Precisely. So, given that it is in the Void, let's assume that the Void is the cause. Matter within the Void which has not—and is not, from the readings—degrading, and is different than any matter we'd ever find, or make, or comprehend making—"

"There are things that can survive the Void," Jamey said. They looked together at the maw-like scar in the ground, an abrupt transition from dirt into nothing.

"A sample," Grace murmured, and lifted the sonic screwdriver before Jamey could protest. The edges of the hole suddenly began to shake and stretch as if it were trying to grow. A low moaning rose out of it, and even as Jamey was reaching to drag his sister back, Grace was moving forward, saying, "There's something in there!"

"_What_?" demanded Jamey, while behind them, Joran and Uncle Tony were shouting themselves hoarse.

"The sonic, it picked up something," she said, and aimed it again. As the high-pitched whine sounded, an answer came from the hole in the world, so deep and loud it made their heads throb.

_Out_, the hole said, and Grace bent closer, trying to see inside. Jamey had had enough. He grabbed his sister's arm and pulled, half-leading, half-pulling her away; she did not resist, but she stayed facing the Void, trying to see. _Out, out, out!_

"Do you hear that?" asked Grace.

"Dammit, Gracie, _run_!" her brother shouted, and she finally picked up the pace. Joran and Uncle Tony waited until the twins came abreast of them to run, but Moijra was long gone, already halfway to her sky-hopper. Grace turned, one last time, to look at the eye-shaped hole, and as her eyes fell on the darkness, a voice roared, _OUT!_

"Gracie!" Jamey cried incredulously, as she stumbled to a halt. He pulled unsuccessfully on her arm. "We've got to _go_—"

"Why? Because it's speaking?" Grace shrugged off his hands and took a few hesitant steps towards the opening to the Void, but the moment she trusted the breach not to attack her, the whining shriek of the universe ripping reached their ears. From the hole a tooth appeared, as if something were pressing its muzzle against the hole and desperately trying to gnaw on it. It vanished, reappeared, and vanished again in quick succession, as if the thing existed only half the time, and wherever it managed to get its massive teeth out, it caught onto the world and swallowed whole pieces.

"God in Heaven," said Jamey, and took the sonic screwdriver out of his sister's nerveless hands. He scanned the thing trying to escape out the breach, and glanced down at the reading just long enough to confirm that it was made of the same stuff that they'd first discovered—changed, impossible matter.

"It's getting out," whispered Grace. Her face was very pale.

Jamey squeezed her hand. "Not yet," he said, and strode forward with his back straight and his chin aloft, his brown eyes dark spots of intensity in a sharp, unforgiving face. He walked until he could feel the air draining away, and shouted at the top of his voice, "Go back the way you came!"

The teeth, impossibly huge, kept gnawing.

"Jamey!" cried Grace.

"I'm telling you now," Jamey roared. "This is a warning! This world is protected, and your actions are perceived as an attack! Stop now, or I will be forced to take action! _Do you hear me?_"

The teeth paused. They stretched over his head, the size of buildings, and then pulled slowly back so that one giant eye could peer out the hole at him. _Take action_, the eye said. _Take whatever action you please. I am the Conqueror. It makes no difference to me what lesser creatures do._

"Yeah?" demanded Jamey. The eye only stared at him. "Well, you asked for it, mate."

He raised the screwdriver, aimed it at the Void, and turned it on. At first it did nothing, and the eye simply gazed, but then the edges of the hole began to condense, pulling together and healing the damage the thing in the Void had done. It screamed and roared and thrashed, trying to get its teeth back out, but Jamey only increased the frequency of his screwdriver until the hole snapped neatly shut. Where the hole had been, there was an expanse of craterous, scarred soil, cut and wrecked as if something had crashed into it.

Grace was the first to reach him. "How did you _do_ that?" she demanded, as the others caught up.

"This is Bebenzar," said Jamey, as if it were obvious.

"Yeah, so?"

"So," said Jamey, with a broad smile on his face, "there's eladenium in the air."

Grace's mouth fell open, and a second later she and her brother were laughing and hugging, as if it were a great joke. Joran and Uncle Tony stood by, panting breathlessly and wholly confused.

"Eladenium!" cried Grace, and fell into a fit of laughter all over again. Jamey had tears in his eyes, he was laughing so hard.

"Mind filling in us lesser mortals?" Uncle Tony asked dryly.

"Eladenium," said Grace, stifling her laughter, though towards the end a little giggle escaped anyway. "_Eladenium_, uncle! Get it? The lightest metal in the universe? An airborne particle found only on Bebenzar?"

"Okay," said Uncle Tony.

"He doesn't get it," Jamey said needlessly, and laughed again.

Grace put her hands on either side of Uncle Tony's head and pressed until his face squished. "What's metal, Uncle Tony?" she cried. "Think! What's metal?"

"Magnetic?" asked Joran, and Jamey clapped him on the shoulder.

"Exactly! Magnetic," said Grace, releasing Uncle Tony in order to put her arm around her brother's shoulders. "And eladenium is _very_ magnetic."

"All I had to do was create a minor electromagnetic field," said Jamey. "The eladenium in the air did the rest, and the force was such that the molecules on either side of the field pulled together."

"Like shutting a purse," Grace agreed.

Uncle Tony's eyebrows came up. "You sealed a breach in the universe with _magnets_?"

"Well, super magnets, to be fair," said Jamey. "A few particles of eladenium can levitate a small ship with the right electromagnetic field."

"And this is what we're breathing in?" demanded Joran. "Why in the name of the gods aren't we wearing masks?"

"He's being thick, Jamey," Grace complained.

"Listen to me very closely, Joran," Jamey said. "The electromagnetic field of a living being _repels_ eladenium. Do you seriously think they'd let you walk about the planet unprotected unless that were the case? Really, man!"

"Don't talk down to me," Joran said stubbornly. "I was just checking to make sure your brain was still working properly."

Uncle Tony snickered. "And I'm the Jolly Green Giant!"

"Don't make me deck you," said Joran, and probably would have tried, if Moijra hadn't chosen that moment to show up. She tumbled down out of her sky-hopper, saying, "You did it! How did you do it? How did you do this impossible thing?"

"The knowledge belongs to my people," Jamey said gravely, and after a short bow, strode away wearing the most brilliantly haughty expression.

"Excuse me," Grace murmured with a straight face, and followed her brother; after a second or two of internal struggle, Joran and Uncle Tony exchanged a look, and then they went away, too. Moijra was left standing beside an empty stretch of ground, looking at their retreating back. This would have been more dramatic if Moijra's estates hadn't been in the middle of nowhere. After he had gone a fair distance, Jamey turned abruptly and came back, with everyone following along in a long line behind him. When he reached the sky-hopper, he said by way of explanation, "Ceremonial cleansing, you know."

"For all of us," added Grace, barely keeping back a smile. Uncle Tony and Joran were already laughing, and Jamey, standing straight and narrow beside the sky-hopper, kept down a blush only by thinking determinedly of other things (teddy bears, football, jelly babies!)

"Of course," said Moijra.

* * *

It was nighttime when they returned to Earth, but not too especially late; down along the neighborhood, most of the people still had their lights on. Everyone piled out of the TARDIS feeling spent and exhausted, now that the adrenaline had worn off, but they were all very cheerful, because this was twice now the twins had managed, some way or another, to seal a breach. Optimism was the name of the game tonight, and no one saw any reason why they couldn't bustle about the universe and seal up all the breaches in such a fashion.

The lights were on in the house, but no one came outside to greet them. This was because Jackie had just found out that her boy was flying in the TARDIS, and going to see some big dark hole in the universe that liked nothing better than to eat whole buildings. There was no halfway point in this. She had done her best to be understanding about Rose and her adventures, but this was one straw too many. The second the twins opened the back door, her shriek poured out.

"—allow the twins drag him into this, I'll never know! How _dare_ you let them take him along! And don't you pretend he wanted to go, I know my Tony, and there's not an adventurous bone in his body!"

"It's true," Uncle Tony said in a low voice, and Joran nodded sagely.

"Mum, please—" began Rose.

"Don't you 'mum' me! My boy is out there, being sucked into a black hole! This is all _your_ fault, Doctor, you're far too loose with those twins—"

"Oh, please," said Jamey, loudly enough to be heard. "If anyone's been loose with our discipline, it's _you_, grandma!"

Uncle Tony let a low hiss of shock. "Mad," he said. "You're absolutely barking mad."

"She insulted Dad," said Grace.

"Out into the open, children," Rose's voice called, and they trooped out of the kitchen and into the front room. Jackie started to say something, but the Doctor lifted his hand, and with a quick gesture, commanded her to be silent; she turned red and looked like she might want to argue, but the Doctor hadn't even looked at her, and wasn't going to.

"Tell me," he said, to the twins. He looked at no one else. He barely even blinked.

"There's something in the Void," Grace said. "Jamey sealed it up in time, but it's definitely going to get out eventually."

"Whatever it is, it's huge," Jamey added. "We saw a tooth. How big was it, Gracie? Twenty feet? Thirty?"

She nodded. "At least."

The Doctor watched them for a second longer, dark eyes moving from one face to the other, checking them, before getting up, putting his arms around them both, and hugging them. "You did very well," he told them, "but I'll take it from here."

"What?" the twins said, together. The Doctor patted them each on the cheek, once, and then let his hands drop.

"It's too dangerous," he said.

"That's rubbish!" said Jamey, suddenly furious. His brown eyes were blazing. "You _know_ we can handle this! We're doing well—really well—"

"It isn't about how well you're doing," said the Doctor.

"Oh, it isn't?" asked Grace, eyebrows moving upward. "It's about the danger of it, then? Well, that's rubbish as well." Her eyes turned to her mother. "How old were you, Mum, when you first went off with Dad? Nineteen?"

"It's different," Rose said finally, provoked.

Grace met her father's gaze steadily. He knew as well as she did what was coming next. "Go on, Dad," said Grace. "Tell her. It's not different at all, is it? That's why you let us go on in the first place."

"It _is_ different," Rose insisted. "I had the Doctor with me."

"If you don't think we can handle it, that's fine," Jamey said, making no effort at all to conceal his disgust. "That's your right."

He turned and left, and a moment later, Grace went too. No one thought much of it until Joran went to find them and discovered instead that the twins—along with the TARDIS—were gone.


	6. Ours

I _knew_ the second I said "I'm going to take a break" that I really, really wouldn't. akljdfl;kjsadfjfdjsdff. In any case, as much as I disliked Chapter Five, I love Chapter Six; it came to me in the wee hours in the morning, when my family was being outrageously loud and not letting me get a wink of sleep. You have them and Alicia Keys to thank for it. (Alicia Keys, you say? Whatever for? Well, Alicia Key's album "Unplugged," was the unofficial soundtrack for this chapter - specifically the songs "Karma" "Wake Up" "Fallin'" and "Love It Or Leave It Alone". It was creepy how well it worked with the general flow of things. xD)

* * *

The twins sat side by side. They were on the TARDIS, backs against the railings, looking at precisely nothing. They had landed the TARDIS—somewhere—and that had been all. The quick escape, the daring retreat. The TARDIS's lights had dimmed to a mellower shade, and the colors, usually so vibrant and alive, moved in quietly dull patterns of grey, blue, white, and mauve.

The twins were saying goodbye.

No one had said anything about banning travel altogether, but their wings had been clipped, and these rules, once imposed, would change everything. The thrill, the freedom, the boldness of doing a thing everyone thought was mad—all that would be gone. The TARDIS would become the interstellar version of a minivan. Have your adventures, children, but don't go that way, don't take on those enemies, don't push yourselves too hard.

It would not be their last trip aboard the TARDIS, that was true, but they wouldn't be flying her, or if they were, they certainly wouldn't be flying her the way they would have liked. They'd have to start leaving the parking brake on again, for one. They would be—passengers. Passengers in their father's TARDIS.

Jamey stretched out one leg until the toe of his sneaker rested against the base of the TARDIS's console. He could feel the steady thrum of her engines, idling, ready for another trip through space and time. Beside him Grace had her hands pressed against the flooring, fingers spread, and when she looked at him, her eyes were bright with tears.

"It was a good run," he told her. Better than most of their campaigns of idiocy, at the very least.

"Yeah," said Grace, "but I'll miss her."

He picked up one of her hands from the floor and laced his fingers through hers. He didn't say anything like "But we'll see her quite often!" or "Pish-posh, not as if we won't fly her again." He knew better. This was the end of a great thing, a brief escapade of beautiful and exhilarating freedom. This had felt right. Maybe it was Grace and her indefatigable curiosity which had begun the whole thing—did she have to fry _every_ circuit?—but they had been having far too much fun to stop. The TARDIS, the stars, and a thousand possibilities!

Around them, the colors had sunk deeper into a melancholy grey. "Oh, now," said Jamey, tapping the console with his shoe, "none of that. Dad'll be taking you out soon. He'll always leave the parking brake on, it's true, but he's basically just a great big kid with an adult's face—you'll have a brilliant time, you'll see."

The colors, if it were possible, only became greyer, until it looked as if they were in a metal version of their TARDIS. Grace's bottom lip was trembling.

"Enough!" said Jamey, suddenly, confronted by a pair of weepy and mourning girls, and slapped his hand against the floor. Grace jumped a little. "Quit it, the both of you!"

Grace stared at him.

"What if we don't go back, then?" Jamey said. "What if we never go back?"

"That's our family, Jamey," Grace said, her voice low. "Our friends—"

Jamey snorted. "What friends? We don't _make_ friends, Gracie."

"I'd say Joran counts as a friend. And by the way, we're his ride. We've stranded him on Earth."

Jamey's lips pressed together. Grace was right, of course, like she was right about most things (she was, and always had been, the voice in his head). They'd have to go back. But they didn't, he decided, have to go back right away. "We're in a time machine," he said to Grace. "Let's go out, let's have some fun before we take her back."

"The Void," said Grace.

"Damn the Void! Let _them_ deal with it, if they're so eager to!"

Grace just looked at him. _We have responsibilities_, that look said. _That thing will just keep eating and it will be our fault for not stopping it._ Jamey leaned his head against the top of the railing, letting it hit with a dull _thunk_ that sent a wash of numb pain through the back of his head. "What do you want to do, then?" Jamey asked sullenly. "Turn her in? Spend the rest of our lives knowing Dad's out there, flying our TARDIS?"

"We only borrowed it," Grace said, with difficulty, but Jamey was shaking his head. She felt the same way. It didn't matter how they'd arrived to this point, the TARDIS was theirs, and it was going to hurt like hell to turn her over to their Dad.

"She's ours," said Jamey. "She's _ours_."

"She's ours," agreed Grace, and all around them, the TARDIS blazed with light and color. The twins shared a look that became a smile, and then they were laughing, laughing until they cried. And the TARDIS, a mass of rainbow-like colors, seemed to laugh with them.

* * *

Joran sat at the Smiths' kitchen table. He'd been sitting there for a while. Uncle Tony sat across from him, his chin pillowed in his hands, and every so often they'd glance at one another and away again. Uncle Tony always looked guilty, because he'd worked so hard to prove that he wasn't one for adventures, and yet here he was, pining away for another. Joran was only sad. Not only were the twins gone, and their adventure with them, but with them was his only ride off the planet. How's them apples?

Getting on towards four in the afternoon, when the Doctor and Rose were gone away on business, and what little sunshine there was began to move towards the horizon, they heard—something. Distant, unclear, hard to say what it was … Joran's hand lifted, prying open the nearby window, and the sound grew louder. It was the grinding _wahoo-wahoo_ of a TARDIS landing with its parking brake still on.

"No way," said Uncle Tony, who yesterday had said that the twins would never come back, not if it meant losing the TARDIS. They ran for the door, sending chairs and teacups flying, and came to the door at just the same moment, so that they got stuck together in the doorframe. Joran shoved Uncle Tony, sending him flying out into the mud, and ran straight past him, arms pumping, in time to see the TARDIS landing on the front lawn.

The twins came out the TARDIS's doors, and leaned together against its blue wooden sides. They watched Joran and Uncle Tony coming with identical knowing smiles. It was Uncle Tony, finally catching up, who cried, "What've you come back for? What if they come home just now?"

"There's mud on your face," said Jamey, and Grace chuckled. "Fancy a ride?"

Grace raised her hand and, making sure they were all watching, snapped her fingers. The doors threw wide, and Joran, saying, "Do I ever!" ran inside, dragging Uncle Tony along behind him by the belt.

"Sorry, Dad," Jamey said, dropping an envelope onto the ground. Grace patted his shoulder, and they went together into the TARDIS, where Joran and Uncle Tony were loudly exclaiming over the extreme brightness and color of everything. ("Why is it glowing?" Uncle Tony cried.) The TARDIS doors closed gently behind them, and across the street, a stunned Mrs. Chaplain watched as the blue box on the Smiths' front lawn vanished into thin air.

* * *

_Dear Dad – _

_You've probably come home late with Mum, so the letter's probably very damp by now, but give me some credit for using a waterproof pen. To be fair, it's your waterproof pen. If you'd like it back I'm sure I can arrange to drop it off sometime._

_If we left a letter, it means you weren't home, all the better for kidnapping Joran and Uncle Tony. That's very well, because I've an inkling that says we'll say this better in a letter than we'd ever manage aloud (at least not without yelling). So, yes, we're out and about, we've got the TARDIS, and now we have Joran and Uncle Tony as well. Shame on us._

_We won't be giving her back, Dad._

_This isn't a thing that is going to end, at least, not now. We've only just got acquainted. And, yes, the thing in the Void is dangerous, I think that's a given. But we were never raised to be the sort who'd run away, and we certainly aren't going to now, just because Mum has some qualms about it. Tell her to have a good long talk with Grandmum if she likes, maybe she'll get it then, do you think?_

_There's a whole universe out there, Dad, and we're going to see it. Maybe there'll be some bumps along the way, but that's the price you pay, as you well know. Grace wishes me to here insert that's not only for selfish purposes. We couldn't leave her, all sad and grey like that. She's got an opinion too, you know. And surely you realize she's not the same TARDIS you knew before. _

_I'm sorry about that. I know you miss yours, even more because she's being driven by a different you, the real you. I can imagine how it'd feel._

_But she's ours, Dad. Not mine, or Gracie's, but _ours_. Do you understand?_

_We love you. We'll be back after you've had a chance to cool off. Meanwhile we might as well find something to do. Don't tell Mum, she'll only worry._

_Love,_

_The Twins_


	7. Five Years' Penance

Well! This is Chapter Seven, come along in the wake of Chapter Six, which was apparently horrifically terrible. You all turned against the poor twins so quickly! lol But, I can't say that I blame you; they were being little turds about the whole thing, though that was rather my point. They're seventeen and foolhardy, and I wanted them to have one of those collosal teenage train-wrecks. We all have one or two, and being that the twins are far from perfect, they couldn't really be exempt! But, not to worry, dear readers: I never really intended to take the TARDIS away from the Doctor. At least, not right away. The twins are seventeen, remember. That's a bit young to be taking over the family business.

Perhaps I should preface, from now on, when there's going to be some sort of upheavel xD Save you all some heartache. At least it was only one chapter's worth! :)

* * *

"Hello!" the voice on the loudspeaker said, drawing the attention of the crowd. Up on the stage stood a young man in a suit, collar undone, with blond hair that had been blown vertical, and a grin that promised nothing good. "Back to your regular entertainment in just a moment, but first off—which of you are the police?"

A few of the crowd stiffened, and the young man snapped his fingers and pointed at them, waggling his eyebrows. "There y'are!" he cried. "I was just wondering if you chaps knew anything about the great big hole on the fifth moon?"

"Treason!" someone shouted. Guns and stun-sticks appeared out of pockets and holsters, all of them aimed up at the stranger.

"Time to run," he said, cheerful. "Tally ho!"

He leapt off the stage, tossing the microphone back to the astonished singer. He went through the doors to the side, and a stampede of police went after him, shouting and waving their badges, and all the while the stranger laughed.

Jamey led his posse of police out of the auditorium and down the back hallways, leather shoes slapping incessantly against the stone floors. He took one turn after another, until only the fastest among the police remained, and it was then that he snapped his fingers and dove into the shelter of a blue service cupboard. The door stayed open, at least long enough for the first policeman to arrive; he was snagged neatly by the shirtfront and dragged inside. By the time the others caught up, the blue service cupboard was gone.

* * *

Inside the TARDIS, the policeman was held captive by Joran, who finally had a reason to use his pistol. The man's face was one of utter astonishment, gazing around at everything, the shifting colors of the TARDIS reflected in his eyes. Once the TARDIS was flying well, Jamey left his sister to tend to the controls, and came down to where the policeman was standing with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," said the policeman, reflexively.

"You are on my spaceship," Jamey told him. "This is your opportunity to ask questions if you have any, Officer Shield-high."

Officer Shield-high gaped. "How do you know my name?"

"Says it on your badge, mate," said Joran, grinning, and nodded to the badge hooked onto the policeman's belt.

"Right, time for questions is over," Jamey said brusquely. "Now it's our turn. I'm taking you to see the Inquisitor."

"The—the what?" Officer Shield-high whispered.

"The Inquisitor," said Joran. He gave Officer Shield-high's shoulder an apologetic pat. "Don't worry. People usually come back in one piece."

"_Usually_?"

"Sometimes," Joran amended. "Occasionally."

"Off we go," said Jamey, and marched Officer Shield-high out of the control room. He led him through a dizzying array of rooms, making sure to keep to the ones that looked official and intimidating (to this end, he passed the library twice) before ending up in Uncle Tony's bedroom, which had been redone to look like an interrogation chamber. Uncle Tony was standing in a corner, his back to the door, wearing a long cape and a high peaked cap that made him look positively monstrous.

"Inquisitor," Jamey said, clicking his heels together, "I've brought the specimen you asked for."

"Excellent," Uncle Tony rasped. "Sit it down."

Officer Shield-high, who was by this time positively trembling, was sat down at the table. Jamey didn't bother with handcuffs, which only seemed to further panic Officer Shield-high. Jamey gave him a wink and shut the door.

"State your identification, creature," Uncle Tony said. His voice was low and gravelly, like someone very scary who'd just begun to lose their voice.

"O-Officer Shield-high, sir."

"What is your purpose?"

"To—protect and defend the planet, sir."

"From all enemies?"

"Yessir."

Uncle Tony whipped around, his cloak flaring magnificently, and roared, "_Including yourselves_?"

Officer Shield-high screamed.

* * *

"Ooh," said Grace, standing with Jamey and Joran at the stairs. "Sounds like it's going well, eh?"

Jamey gave Joran a nudge with his elbow. "Uncle Tony took drama in high school, you know."

The telephone rang.

The twins looked at one another, and Joran said incredulously, "Is that a _phone_?"

"Yeah," said Grace.

"On a _spaceship_?"

"Yeah," said Jamey, and bolted for the control room. Grace wasn't far behind. He slid to a halt in front of the TARDIS's controls and snatched up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Hello," said the Doctor's voice.

Jamey paled. "Dad."

"I should hope so. What other kind of Doctor would be calling?" The Doctor snickered a little, and then shushed someone in the background. "Your mother wishes me to say that's she's very cross with you for not saying goodbye properly."

"What—" Jamey's face was the image of confusion. "_That's_ why she's cross? Did you not get our letter? We practically gave you permission to ground us for life—"

"Yes," said the Doctor. "That. It was a damned naughty thing to do. Couldn't you just steal Dad's Ferrari like normal children?"

"You don't have a Ferrari," said Jamey.

"Oh, very true. I suppose it was the TARDIS or nothing, then.—I'm _getting_ to that, Rose!—Here, I wrote you a letter as well. Let me read it to you. 'Dear Children: I am very, very cross with you. Signed, the Doctor.' " There was a pause. "That was sarcasm."

"I don't understand," Jamey said. "Are you saying you're not angry?"

"I'm saying you're both foolish little gits," said the Doctor, "but I can hardly be angry with you for stealing the TARDIS. I have a similar history, you know. But whether or not I'm angry really has nothing at all to do with it. You need to bring her back, son."

Grace snatched up the phone. "We're going to see this through to the end, Dad!"

"And that's marvelously brave of you," the Doctor agreed. "Put me on speaker if you please, Grace."

She smacked the button on the phone, and let the receiver drop. The Doctor's voice filled the room. "Being our children," said the Doctor, "we can hardly expect any less of you. But you are not ready. _Any_ of you. The TARDIS included. You're all very young, very inexperienced—this is too much for you."

"Stop _saying_ that," said Grace, furious. "We can handle it, we can!"

"Oh, for—" Rose's voice said in the background. "Is this what parents usually have to deal with?"

"Without fail," answered the Doctor. "Now listen to me, Gracie: we're not trying to _separate_ you. The TARDIS has grown up with you lot, and I'd have to be a blind man not to see that you all are best mates. But I'm not going to throw my children at a universe-ending creature inside of a teenaged TARDIS. Now hold her still. I mean it, now. Hold her still."

Jamey yanked a knob, and the TARDIS slowed to a halt; a second later the Doctor materialized with Rose in tow, a Time Agent vortex manipulator around one wrist. He pulled it off and dropped it off the side of the control room deck.

"We've decided, therefore," said the Doctor, as if there hadn't been a break in their conversation, "that if you absolutely _refuse_ to stay quietly at home—and now that I think about it, I don't believe I've seen you do _anything_ quietly—then we might as well take you with us."

Grace wasn't listening. She was looking at the walls, which were still colorful and merry. "She doesn't look sad," she said.

"The TARDIS," the Doctor said, moving busily about the controls, "is very young. Very, very young. She's not as smart, yet, as the TARDIS the other me has. And young TARDISes are notoriously rebellious—you were having a grand time, weren't you, without me there constantly inputting data in your memory banks. Hold on!"

The TARDIS launched forward, lurching and pitching. Grace rolled her eyes, and not-so-subtly yanked down a lever. "I hate that lever," said the Doctor. "It's a miserable lever."

"It's a fly-straight lever," said Jamey.

"Where's the fun in flying straight?" Rose wanted to know, but it was said with such sarcasm that the Doctor could hardly miss it.

"No," said Grace. "Not so fast. I'm not done yet. We don't want to be grounded—"

"Oy, the melodrama!" cried the Doctor. "Someone open a window, I'm smothering!"

"Be serious, Dad!" Grace said furiously.

"I _am_ serious," the Doctor said. "You'll have your turn with the TARDIS, my dear, but only once you've all had a chance to grown up. Can you imagine, three teenagers mucking about the universe—"

"How do you know we haven't already grown up?" asked Jamey, and the Doctor looked up suddenly, wearing his serious face. He came round the controls to peer into Jamey's eyes, brows drawing together.

"I don't," said the Doctor. "But I can tell you, without a shadow of the doubt, that our TARDIS has not. The growth period for these ships is usually ten times longer, Jamey. I've sped it up as much as I can but she's still _forming_." The Doctor paused. "What would you do in the case of entropy failure?"

"I—don't know," said Jamey.

"Or reverse particle displacement?"

"I don't know."

"Spatial coupling degeneration?"

"I _don't know_."

"Exactly," said Rose. "You don't know. You've gone running out into the universe in a newly grown TARDIS, and none of you half the things you should."

"We're learning, Mum," Grace said.

"That you are," agreed the Doctor. "Let's say, then, that we forgive the massively bad idea that was stealing the TARDIS, and gamble on it instead—if you can prove to me, by the end of this, that you really are ready for the TARDIS, then I won't say another word. You can wheel about the stars without a thing to hold you back."

"But Dad," said Jamey, in a low, ashamed voice, "it's your TARDIS too—"

"Oh, catching on, are you?" asked Rose, her eyebrows raised. "You can both be pretty thick, for geniuses. Should have expected that, but somehow still a surprise. How's it feel to think of someone other than yourself for once?"

"That's a tad bit unfair," said the Doctor. "They were thinking of the TARDIS. It was romantic, right? Freeing the TARDIS and escaping to grand adventures?"

"We weren't going to steal her," Jamey insisted. "It was just to say goodbye. But the TARDIS just looked so—_sad_."

"No need to tell me twice," the Doctor told his son. "I believe you. You're grounded for the next five years of your life, and you're going to be doing some healthy community service when we get back, but I believe you."

A scream lit the air, and the Doctor spun on the balls of his feet to look up at the hallway. "What was _that_?" he asked, eyebrows jumping.

"Probably Officer Shield-high," said Grace. "Uncle Tony's interrogating him."

"_What_?" Rose demanded.

Jamey rolled his eyes. "Not like that, Mum. The government's sealed off the breach on this world, made it unplottable, so in order to break in we need the coordinates. So we kidnapped a police officer."

"We're putting on a little show for him," Grace agreed, grinning wickedly. "Uncle Tony as—the Inquisitor!"

"Oh, brilliant," said the Doctor, just as the screaming Officer Shield-high was frog-marched from out of the TARDIS's depths. He was pale and sweating, and when he saw the twins, began screaming anew.

"Aliens!" he raved. "I've been kidnapped by aliens! I want to go home! _Aliens_! Gods above, they're all of them _aliens_!"

"What did you _do_ to him?" asked Rose, with an expression that said she expected the worst. The twins could hardly blame her, after they'd gone and stolen the TARDIS.

"You'll see," Grace said, manipulating the controls so that they U-turned back towards the planet. They arrived just in time for Joran to toss the terrified Officer Shield-high out onto a lawn. Meanwhile Uncle Tony was coming down to the main control room, still dressed in his outfit, and looking very pleased with himself indeed. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the Doctor and Rose standing there.

"Doctor," he said. "Rose. What're you doing here?"

"Nice hat," said the Doctor.

"We're grounded," said Grace.

"Ah," said Uncle Tony. "Yes. I would—imagine so." He took off his hat and began to twist it anxiously. "Does this mean we're going home?"

"Not unless you've failed to get us the coordinates," said the Doctor, and Uncle Tony, grinning from ear to ear, was so happy he could have cried. He was sure no one would remember, but it was only because of him that they'd gotten the coordinates—it was Uncle Tony, for once, who'd saved the day. It was a feeling unlike any other, and he wished it would never stop.

"I wrote them down here while he was crying," said Uncle Tony, showing them his arm. "How did you like my performance, by the way? I'm sure you heard it, I was yelling, he was shrieking, it was all very loud."

"It was marvelous, Uncle Tony," said Grace.

"Yeah, Tony," said Jamey. "Marvelous!"

And then, because they were the twins, they applauded him; and Uncle Tony, who at that moment didn't care a whit if they were making fun of him or not, gave an elaborate bow.

* * *

There was six of them now, facing a hole in the world, though perhaps you could have counted them as ten, for surely in the general math of things, the Doctor did not add up to a single man. But in any case there were six of them, standing all in a row, with the TARDIS a reasonable distance away, and the sonic screwdriver safely in the hands of the Doctor.

"It's immense," said Rose. "This is what you've been sealing up?"

"The last one was bigger," said Joran, proud of the twins, though they gave him a look that could have curdled milk. They didn't want their parents to get the idea that maybe it really _was_ too dangerous.

"Exactly right," murmured the Doctor, eyes moving back and forth and back again with inhuman rapidity as he thought. He was taking the measure of the hole in reality, and he didn't seem to like what he found. For one, it was a hole in reality. For another, it was huge, and there were no eladenium to help them here. "Suspended matter in the center, remnant of the initial attack, fifty quadrillion to the squared of nineteen, and if you double-back the axis of the—"

"This is why I called you the Gibberish Man when I was a kid," said Uncle Tony, who found it highly frustrating when he couldn't understand what the Smiths were saying.

"It's not gibberish," said Grace. "He's saying that the circumference of the hole is directly in relation to amount of matter in the center."

"Oh, _right_, so obvious, please excuse me."

"Buck up, mate, I didn't get it either," Joran told him.

"That would have made me feel loads better," Uncle Tony returned, "if you weren't a pub-crawler."

"Be nice, children," said Rose, giving them all her best mum-look.

The Doctor paced out to the hole and scanned it with his sonic screwdriver. They all watched him work, silent, but no more than half a minute had gone by before Grace got the fidgets and went out after her father. Jamey wasn't about to be left behind, and Rose wasn't the sort to watch her Doctor and her children walk about a great big hole in the fabric of reality without her, and so off they went, leaving Joran and Uncle Tony to watch from afar.

"Think maybe we should go too?" asked Joran.

"Are you nuts?" demanded Uncle Tony. "The first one ate an asteroid, and the second had a dinosaur that tried to _eat_ us. I'm not going anywhere _near_ that thing."

"Right," said Joran. "Right. Me neither."

"What did you do the first time?" the Doctor was asking the twins, as Joran and Uncle Tony talked behind them.

Jamey shrugged. "That was all Grace. She got it to start sucking in matter somehow, and eventually it closed up."

"Very well done, my dear," the Doctor said to Grace, who swelled with pride. "And the second time, you said, you closed it using the eladenium in the air?"

Jamey nodded.

"And what did we learn from this?"

The twins just stared at him. Jamey was waiting for Grace to speak, but Grace, who for once had no idea, was waiting for Jamey, and in the end neither one of them spoke at all. So Rose said, "There's nothing holding the ruptures open."

"Correctamundo!" cried the Doctor, pointing a finger at her. "Flying boulders and agitated eladenium possess a lot of force, that's true, but not nearly enough if something were actively holding them open. So, Q.E.D., there is nothing on the other side of this hole with the technology to hold it open. And if it does not have the technology to hold open a tear in the universe, it follows that it does not have the technology to _make_ the tear, either."

"But how could it be putting holes in the universe if it doesn't have the technology?" Jamey asked, perplexed.

"The teeth!" Grace realized.

"_Yes_! The teeth!" cried the Doctor. He was grinning like he'd been given a special treat. "It's literally _chewing_ through the fabric of reality. It's brilliant, I tell you. How big—how _powerful_—would this thing have to be to survive in the Void, let alone chew its way out?"

"It called itself the Conqueror," Grace told him. "It didn't believe we'd have the power to stop it."

"Well, it wouldn't, would it," agreed the Doctor. "To have such raw power, it would have had to be in the Void for millennia. The last time it saw other creatures, half the universe would have been in the primitive stages."

"Is it that old?" asked Rose, tucking a strand of blond hair back behind her ear.

"Older, probably," said the Doctor. His smile faded as he looked down into the unbearable darkness of the Void.

"Have you seen it before, then?" Grace asked.

The Doctor shook his head. "No. Like I said, this thing is old—very old. Older even than the Time Lords. It's a relic from the dawn of time, when things were bigger and meaner. It would have been as a god then. I can't even imagine what millions of years in the Void would have done to it."

"I'm not sure I _want_ to imagine," murmured Jamey.

Deep within the Void, the Conqueror heard, and was hungry.


	8. The Narrow Escape

Ohh, I had so much fun doing this chapter! I practically killed me not to post it yesterday, but these things should be spaced out. There's a lot of the Doctor in this one, and that's all I'm going to say. :3

* * *

"We'll need the TARDIS for this one," said the Doctor, stuffing his sonic screwdriver into his jacket pocket. He waved a hand backward in the TARDIS's general direction. "Gracie, Jamey, fetch her if you please; we're going to use the TARDIS to push the edges together."

"Aren't you coming?" asked Jamey.

"Oh, no," the Doctor said, with a twinkle in his eyes. "I'll supervise from down here. Along you go."

The twins exchanged an excited look before beating a hasty retreat back to the TARDIS, while their mother gripped the Doctor's elbow and said in a low voice, "Is that really wise?"

"Small danger," said the Doctor. "Or—medium-sized danger. There's always the possibility that the balance between something and nothing may shift and things will be sucked in, like the asteroid, but really, that's a very _small_ possibility—well. Medium-sized. Very small, medium-sized possibility of danger."

"You'd better be right," said Rose, lips pursed into a frown. "If they get sucked into the Void, so help me God, I _will_ poison your afternoon tea."

"Kinky!" exclaimed the Doctor. "I like it."

Though she would have preferred to scowl, Rose shook her head and smiled.

* * *

The twins ran straight past Joran and Uncle Tony, without even bothering to stop, though Jamey did do them the service of shouting, "We're going to shut the hole with the TARDIS!"

"Exciting!" said Uncle Tony, and a second later he and Joran were pelting after the twins. They slid inside just before the twins set the engines, and had just enough time to clutch at the walkway railings before everything went wild. Grace ran one way, to fix the jerking, but Jamey ran that way too, and they collided on the other side of the controls; the TARDIS gave a crazy dip, and while the twins were shouting at one another, the Doctor's voice came through.

"I do hope you're planning on doing this today," he said.

"Yeah, yeah!" shouted Grace, and hit the right spinny-wobbly thing. On the viewer, they could see the edges of the hole beginning to waver and tremble, just like before.

"Looks like it's working," said Jamey. "Give it a little more juice, Gracie."

"Aye, aye," she said, and wrenched won hard on the spinny-wobbly thing. But something was wrong. It wasn't working. The engines weren't straining, the hole wasn't closing. Grace reached out and jammed a little green button (power rerouter to engines, you know) and finally the TARDIS's engines kicked in, except that when they did, and the hole began to close, the TARDIS began to move.

"What's that?" called Uncle Tony. "Are we moving? Why are we moving?"

"Shut up!" yelled the twins, racing about the controls, trying everything they could think of to reverse the TARDIS's direction; but nothing worked. They were being pulled irrevocably into the Void. In desperation Jamey kicked down the All Stop brake, bringing the creaking lever all the way down to the floor, but it did nothing; if anything, they sped up.

"Dematerialize!" the Doctor shouted at them from the surface, his voice flooding through the TARDIS. "Phase out of this time! Do it, do it, hurry!"

"We're _trying_!" Grace yelled, hanging onto the dematerializer, but no matter which way she yanked it, the TARDIS did not respond. They were caught, and one way or another, they were going into the Void. She and Jamey looked at one another from across the controls, identical fear in their identical brown eyes, and Grace said aloud, "Dad?"

"Yes?"

"We love you," she said, and put every ounce of power into the shields. The TARDIS gave one more shuddering effort, straining to keep out of the hole, before slipping downward into the eternal darkness betwixt worlds.

* * *

They awoke aboard a silent TARDIS, stretched out wherever they had fallen. When Grace raised her aching head, she could see a little red blinking light on the controls—the distress signal had been activated. Jamey, collapsed nearby, was only just beginning to stir, and so she guessed that it was the TARDIS's doing. With a great effort she climbed to her feet and began to check the ship over, but beyond a massive power drain, nothing seemed broken in the slightest.

"Gracie?" Jamey said, hoarse, and she came round to see him. "What's happened?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "Help me get some power to the scanners. I can't see where we are."

Neither of them mentioned the obvious: it was probable that they weren't anywhere, that the reason the TARDIS was drained was because it was putting every bit of power it had into keeping them safe from the effects of the Void. To that end, they wired together their cell phone batteries in order to give the scanners just enough juice for a single reading; they didn't want to detract from the shields if those were the only things keeping them alive.

The scanner bleeped and then hummed, and on the screen the reading appeared: Earth, 2014. Then the screen went dead, the humming stopped, and their cell phone batteries sparked their connections. The twins stared at the screen, astonished, for a long while. The reading seemed burned into their retinas. Earth, 2014_._ Not the Void, not emptiness, not a blank screen or an error—Earth, 2014.

"Fudged the date a little," said Jamey. "Could be worse."

"Could be a _lot_ worse!" cried Grace, and hugged him. They laughed so loudly that they awoke Uncle Tony and Joran, who were thrown together against the doors. It took them a while to untangle, but once they'd managed, Uncle Tony came up to the twins and asked, "What happened? Are we dead?"

"Course not, _Tony_," said Jamey, flicking his uncle cheerfully on the forehead. Uncle Tony scowled and rubbed his face where Jamey had got him. "The TARDIS was brilliant. We were pulled into the Void, but she flew us out again. Probably though one of the holes that thing made, if I had to guess."

"Brilliant, brilliant machine," agreed Grace. "It's drained her completely, though."

"So we're stuck here?" asked Joran. "Where _is_ here, anyway?"

"Why?" asked Uncle Tony. "Are you going to take us to the local pub?"

"Will you _shut up_ about the pubs already?" demanded Joran, nearly shouting. "When a man goes about risking his life on a daily basis, a little recreational 'pub-crawling,' as you call it—" He put heavy quotations around the word with his fingers. "—is just about the only entertainment there _is_. So if you'll excuse me, your Royal Highness, I believe I will indeed go to the local pub, if there is one, and I'll have a bloody fine time of it!"

"What he said," said Jamey, with a hint of a smile.

"You can shut it as well," snapped Joran. "It's _your_ incessant needling that turns him into such a regular beast. I think he'd actually be a nice sort of bloke if you weren't running around, pulling his pigtails."

"I haven't got pigtails," Uncle Tony said indignantly.

"Yeah?" said Grace. "Then don't be such a girl."

Uncle Tony actually looked shocked, but Grace was laughing, and gave him a loud smack on the cheek to make up for it. "Just kidding, just kidding," she said. "All you boys need to take a good long breather. If you feel the urge to squabble, jump in the pool."

"Are we going to go outside and see _where_ on Earth we're at?" Jamey asked, rolling his eyes heavenward. "If we're in Upper Mongolia I wish to lodge a complaint."

"Oh, yes, let's," said Grace, and they pushed past Uncle Tony and Joran. They had a little difficulty opening the doors, but the TARDIS had just enough oomph left to release the locks, and open they sprang. The twins poked their heads outside and gave a sniff.

"Well?" asked Joran. "Where are we?"

"Just outside of Cardiff, I think," Grace called back over her shoulder. "Smells like Cardiff. Jamey?"

"Cardiff," he agreed.

Grace smiled and patted the TARDIS's exterior, in the shape now of a tall glass telephone booth, plastered all up and down with advertisements to the twins' favorite music and movies. "Brilliant machine. _Beautiful_ machine."

"She really is excellent," said Jamey. "Shall we go exploring?"

"Look at that!" said Uncle Tony, pointing over the twins' shoulders to across the street. "Isn't that remarkable? It's an old police box! You know, that always was my favorite shape for the TARDIS to turn into. I felt like a regular bobby."

"Uh oh," said Jamey.

"What? Why?" asked Uncle Tony.

"I knew it was too good to be true," said Grace.

Uncle Tony stamped his foot. "_What is it_?"

"Careful, Tony," said Jamey. "Your pigtails are showing."

"For Christ's sake—"

"When have you ever seen a police box, Uncle Tony?" Grace interrupted. "When have you gone by a street and said, oh, look, there's a police box! Never, I bet. That's because no one uses them anymore. They're obsolete. The only reason you'd see a blue police box lying around was if my Dad were inside it."

Uncle Tony's eyes rounded. "Oh. _Oh_."

"He's caught on," Jamey said, with approval.

"I haven't," said Joran. "What's that mean?"

"It means we're not where we're supposed to be," Uncle Tony told him. "If that can only be a TARDIS, and we're inside the TARDIS, then it follows—"

Joran was blank.

"We're not in the right universe, git," said Jamey. "The TARDIS got us out of the Void, all right, but she took us through the wrong hole. We've come out the wrong way."

The blue police box's doors opened, and out of it came two men and a girl. None of them looked at all like their father, but that didn't matter to the twins. It was as if they could _feel_ who he was. His face was different, his eyes—_their_ eyes—were different, even his walk was different, but he was still, without a doubt, the Doctor.

He came toward them at a brusque pace, face fixed into a scowl, his jacket flapping in a Cardiff breeze. The little flip of his hair bounced every time he took a step, and Jamey, fighting the urge to pat his own stiff, upswept spikes, was perversely glad that their Dad was their Dad. To have inherited that hair! It didn't bear thinking about.

"Who are you?" the Doctor asked, without preamble. "What are your names?"

The twins shared dimpled smiles. Oh, but this would be fun, great fun indeed!

"Hello, Dad," they chorused.


	9. Doctor Who? Eleven!

I can't even describe how much fun I have writing Eleven. Ten is amazing, of course, he's Ten for crissake, but Eleven's my first honest Doctor; it was only after watching season 5 that I went back and watched all the rest, and was truly hooked. Therefore my understanding of the Doctor and his mannerisms are filtered through Eleven, and I'm constantly having to reign it back. Now that I'm legitimately writing Eleven, though ... :D Also, Amy is delightful. Very easy. It was Rory that was the real difficulty. I couldn't get down that confused teddy bear thing he does, so I maybe cut out his parts and gave them to someone else ... . I apologize if you're a Rory fan. It's nothing against Rory specifically, it's just that half his character are those little twitchy movements he does, and I don't even know where to begin to describe them xD

* * *

"Did they say dad?" demanded Amy Pond. "Are they his kids? Are you his kids? Doctor, you have _kids_?"

"Shh," said the Doctor, wearing his perplexed face, while the twins grinned and grinned. "I don't know. They could be. It's possible, it's happened before."

"Without your knowing about it?" Amy's expression was one of extreme doubt. "Seems to me you'd have to take some part in the, ah, you know, _creation_ bit."

"Yes, actually," he said. "Now quiet. I'm thinking. I'm thinking—"

"You're thinking that we're not possible in _this_ universe," said Grace. "You're thinking we look like you, but the wrong you. Am I right?"

"Children from another universe," said Amy. "Kinky."

"That's _weird_," Rory corrected. "It stands to reason he'd have weird, other-universe children. Can you imagine him having children the proper way?"

Amy's eyebrows rose and she looked the Doctor up and down. "Now that you mention it," she said, "yes."

Rory lips pulled down. "_Not_ what I meant, actually—"

"Did I not say to hush?" the Doctor demanded. He looked at the twins. "You still haven't told me your names."

"Grace and Jamey Smith, at your service, sir," said Grace, with a snappy salute. "Grace is short for absolutely blooming nothing, but Jamey is short for James. Ring a bell?"

"What does she mean?" asked Amy.

"I used to be quite fond of aliases," said the Doctor. "Particularly _those_ aliases. I take it you're named James because my name is John? Wait. Stop. It doesn't matter what your names are, you're _here_. Why are you here? Why are you in my TARDIS?"

"Complicated, that," said Jamey.

"Which?"

Grace shrugged. "All of the above. But to start, _our_ TARDIS. We're—sharing. I think."

"We're grounded," Jamey admitted. "We stole it. But Dad let us have another go. So, yeah, sharing's the right word, I expect. As for why we're _here_, well—"

"Good ole girl," said Grace, patting the TARDIS. "Beautiful, isn't she? Newer model than yours, mate. Our chameleon circuit still works. I'll fix yours, if you like. Dad showed me how, for emergencies. Said it might come in handy. There was a point to this. What was my point? Oh. Yes. She saved us."

"Saved us in the wrong direction, mind you—" began Jamey.

"—but saved us all the same," finished Grace. "All by her lonesome, poor girl." She gave the TARDIS's side a swift rap. "I bet you were terrified, eh? And all of us out like a light!"

"They are so definitely your children," said Amy. The Doctor squinted at her.

"Saved you," said the Doctor. "Saved you from—"

"The Void," said Jamey. "The TARDIS saved us from the Void."

"Oy," said Amy. "I know what that is."

"Then you know it's not good," said Grace. "We didn't expect to live at all. I thought we'd be trapped out there with that _thing_, forever, or at least until it ate us."

"Hi," said Uncle Tony. "Hi there. I'm standing here, right behind you, and I can't see a bloody thing. I can hear that the Doctor's out there, but his voice has gone funny, and I want to _see_, goddammit. And Joran wants to go to a pub."

"I'll wring your foul neck if you say that again," said Joran, and sounded as if he meant it.

"Thing," repeated the Doctor.

"Can't you _move_?" yelled Uncle Tony, and he must have shoved them, because a moment later they all went sprawling out onto the sidewalk in a mass of flailing arms and legs. They were all shouting at one another, until words were impossible to distinguish. It only stopped when Grace bellowed to the skies, "If you all don't get off me right this instant, I'll be forced to do very, very bad things!"

Up leapt Joran and Uncle Tony, shortly followed by Jamey, who bent solicitously to help up his sister. She dusted off her jeans and glared at all of them. "What did I say?" she demanded of them. "What did I _just_ bloody say? It can't have been more than a minute ago. I said, 'If you feel the urge to squabble—' "

"Riveting," interrupted the Doctor. "But perhaps it would be best if someone explained to me _precisely_ what is that's going on."

"Right," said Jamey, tugging his shirt into place. "Well. You'd better come inside, then. It might take a while."

* * *

The Doctor sat inside a TARDIS. Not_ the_ TARDIS, or _his_ TARDIS, but _a_ TARDIS. It was a cheerful thought. He'd had no way of knowing, until now, whether or not the Meta-Crisis Doctor had successfully caused the piece of TARDIS to germinate. There had been one type-40 TARDIS in the universe: now there were two.

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, _not_ his TARDIS; it was that, if nothing else, that convinced him that the twins spoke the truth. It was theoretically possible that someone might have stolen his TARDIS in the future and taken in backward in order to fool him. But the interior of the twins' ship was utterly unlike his own. It flowered open in a great, shell-like spiral, moving upward into an impossibly high ceiling. It had a very organic feel to it, like a leaf just unfurled, and though the control room's deck was steel and hard, it grew seamlessly out of the rest of the room. The trouble was that it was all very dark and cold, with only the barest of light to see by. This TARDIS was not well.

"That's everything, I think," said Grace, leaning with her brother against the railing. Amy and Rory were across from the twins, on the far side of the control room, the both of them utterly entranced. The idea that there was, somewhere, a human Doctor with a wife and children, was simultaneously hysterical and terrifying. The worst part of it all was that the twins really _were_ like the Doctor; they had the same intensity, the same inevitable genius hidden behind a ridiculous façade.

"Interesting," said the Doctor, still pacing about the control room, as he had since the twins begun their tale. He came to a stop before the controls, and began looking them over with the air of a connoisseur. "Very interesting—oy, what's this? You've got a spinny-wobbly thing!"

"Yeah," said Grace. "What of it?"

"Get rid of that," said the Doctor. "I hate the spinny-wobbly thing. It's a rubbish spinny-wobbly thing."

"Get off it," said Jamey. "We like our spinny-wobbly thing."

"Actually, I do think it malfunctioned," said Grace. "At the third hole, I mean. We were going to tow the edges of the breach together, and force it to close that way, but when we went to do it, it didn't work."

"Of course it didn't work," said the Doctor. "It's a rubbish spinny-wobbly thing. I made mine into a watch, makes a spectacular watch, although it likes to make this ghastly hissing sound whenever you go past a train station, really very inconvenient, you couldn't ever take the train—"

"Take a breath, man," said Jamey, with a gently amused smile. The Doctor looked very surprised, and Amy and Rory as well; there weren't many people in the universe who spoke like that to the Doctor. "Moving along, we need to fix up the TARDIS and go back home."

"Yes," said the Doctor. "Right. Of course. I'll tow you to the rift, it's very close."

"Much obliged," said Grace.

"Just out of curiosity, though," said the Doctor, "how are you planning to get back? Ripping holes in the universe is really very inadvisable, I haven't the greatest experience with it myself."

"We cheat," said Jamey.

"You what?" asked Amy.

Jamey raised his eyebrows at her and gave them a waggle. "We cheat. As in—on triche. Wir betrügen. Nos engañan—"

"They get the picture, Jamey," Grace said, rolling her eyes heavenward. "He means that _hypothetically_, we'll cheat. We haven't actually done it before."

"Oh, please," said Jamey. "Technicalities. We've _closed_ a gap from there before, no reason we can't do it again. Making a hole in the universe is the simple part."

"Care to elaborate?" asked the Doctor.

"Oh, come on," said Grace, grinning. "Can't you figure it out? Once we say it aloud, you'll feel _really_ stupid. It's so simple it's brilliant."

The Doctor narrowed his eyes at them, an expression their father wasn't given to; it was an expression uniquely this Doctor's, very dark and very intimidating. The twins exchanged a look, and Jamey said, "Bebenzar."

"Ah!" shouted the Doctor, and gave the air a furious punch. "I should have known! It was there, in my brain, but I thought, nooo, too simple, too easy, probably it wouldn't even work—"

"I did it," Jamey said smugly, "with a sonic screwdriver."

The Doctor clapped his hands together, once, but very loud. "Brilliant!" he cried. "You're brilliant!"

"Is this what their father's like?" Amy asked Uncle Tony, who was standing the closest. "Very, you know, excitable?"

"Um," said Uncle Tony. "I don't know. He's the Doctor. Just not—this Doctor."

"That doesn't even make sense," said Rory.

"He shouts a lot as well," Joran said, leaning around Uncle Tony, "and they both talk very fast, but our Doctor doesn't look quite so—what's the word—"

"Insane," supplied Uncle Tony.

"Right. Insane. Mad. Bonkers. Ours is just sort of—"

"Quirky," said Uncle Tony.

"_Exactly_. But I will say this," Joran added, watching the Doctor pace around and gesture wildly, "this one scares me just as much as the other."

The Doctor broke off in mid-sentence to look at Joran, who was still leaning crazily to one side. Joran looked back at him in wide-eyed fear. "Come now!" cried the Doctor. "There's nothing to fear. It's just me, little old me, pottery old me, minding my own business—"

"What a great big a liar you are," said Grace, and the Doctor looked at her in surprise. "I suppose in the great scheme of things you're my uncle, or maybe my grandfather, but in any case we're family, and you can't lie to family, Doctor. Don't forget who it was who taught us our letters—and I don't mean English letters, either."

"Do you mean to say you can write Gallifreyan?" asked Amy, impressed, and the Doctor's head whipped around to see the twins' reactions. They were both of them very serious as they looked at him.

"We can show you if you like," said Grace, "but Dad's very strict about it—he doesn't like the idea of High Gallifreyan script floating about the universe."

"Quite right," agreed the Doctor. He tapped his fingers against his lips as he thought. He said, "There's a great big beast in the Void."

"Huge," said Uncle Tony. "Teeth the size of houses!"

"And you mean to—what?"

The twins looked perplexed. "What do you mean?" asked Grace. "Isn't it obvious? We're going to keep it from crawling out."

"You're going to _trap_ it," contradicted the Doctor loudly, bringing his hand down on the TARDIS's controls, hard, so that it gave a loud bang. "It's been surviving there for the first half of the universe, and now you want it to try and endure the rest? What sort of cruelty is this?"

"You're one to talk," said Jamey, in a tight voice that betrayed the extent of his impatience. "_You're_ still immortal."

"Oh," said the Doctor. "I wouldn't call it that."

"Immortal for however long you choose, then," Grace said. "Semantics. What would you suggest? That we let it escape and eat up the world? It's swallowed whole space ports, Doctor. Millions of lives have been lost. It simply has got to stop."

"Of course I'm not suggesting _that_," the Doctor said, looking very amused. "What do you take me for? I'm just saying, the Void's a bit sterile for a prison, isn't it? You could do better, I think."

One of Jamey's eyebrows quirked. "What did you have in mind?"

* * *

It was a very black day on the fifth moon of Grunadi. The Doctor and his wife sat together on a rock, looking at the place a hole had been, a hole into which their children—and their ride home—had vanished. Rose had her arm through the Doctor's, and her forehead rested against his shoulder. She hadn't, as of yet, poisoned his tea, but perhaps that was only because they hadn't had any tea yet. This was just as well, because to the best of the Doctor's knowledge, the tea on Grunadi tasted like well-boiled ash.

Neither of them really thought that the children might have survived, but for the same reason the twins hotwired the scanners into working, they sat on their rock and waited. They waited long enough for Rose's tears to dry, and a little more than a half an hour later, there was a great thud, directly behind where they were sitting. They turned in place to see what had happened, and saw that the TARDIS had landed, appearing in the shape of a blocky sort of construction vehicle.

"Oh, they're good," said Rose. "You could barely hear it!"

"Shut it," said the Doctor.

The twins came tumbling out of the TARDIS and ran straight into the arms of their parents. Everyone laughed and everyone (with the possible exception of Jamey, who liked to be manly) shed a tear or two, but not for too long, because they were the Smiths, and impossible things happened to them every day. This sort of thing was to be expected, after a while.

"You made it!" cried Rose, holding on tightly to her daughter, who usually would have complained, but now seemed not to mind at all. "But how?"

"That's the complicated bit," said Jamey, sticking his hands down his pockets and rocking backward on his feet. "The TARDIS got us out of the Void, but we came out in the wrong universe. _Your_ universe, to be precise." Rose's breath caught, and the Doctor's eyes widened just a little. "We met you, Dad. Well. The next you. And he's got this really brilliant idea …"


	10. A Day at the Zoo

Good golly, what's this, the last chapter? Why, it is! However, I hope you lot read my author's notes, because I wish to advertise that the twins are not done in the least. I've already got another thing in the works, in which the twins' character arc comes round. Let's consider "Inheritance" a sort of two-part premiere. The next story to come round will take them into deeper and more interesting territory. EDIT 10/7: The second story, which was indeed planned, is postponed, perhaps indefinitely; at the moment, I've very little time for anything. I'm scribbling my stories into a notebook during lectures at the very best, and the twins deserve a little more attention than half-distracted blurbs. So, very sorry, but this will have to do you. :) Cheers!

P.S. For all of you MC-Ten/Rose people out there, I've added a bit for you. :)

P.P.S. I need to give credit to the person who could be understandably designated the co-writer of this piece, Bekah, who is my sounding board, fact checker, beta reader, and inspiration all rolled into one. Pretty much every idea you see here was run by her first, and usually tweaked until a bad idea became a good idea. Although she didn't actually put pen to paper, she might as well have. The twins and their adventures are the product of a sunny day upon a bench, overlooking the quad, and as I'm saying, "What if Meta-crisis Ten and Rose had a kid?" Bekah came back saying, "What if they had _twins_?" You've gotta love having a friend like that.

* * *

There was, not too far from the center of the universe, an enchanting place, that boasted all kinds of entertainment and retreats, one of the most popular of which were the _charmante villa des vacances_, little foreign retreats complete with their own houses, ponds, and triple moons. You could take a short hopper ride to the Burning Sea and watch the universe's most spectacular sunset, or go shopping at Motogatu Square (in reality, it was more of a wriggly rectangle) which had the most diverse shopping experience this side of the Crab Nebula. But for whatever reason you were visiting the High Winds Resort, the largest and most significant of all of these was the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creatures Preserve.

It was said that the Preserve had drifted outward from the far center of the galaxy some thousands of years ago, built by a civilization no one knew of (or, if they knew, would speak of) and let go for an equally unknown (or unspeakable) reason. However it had come to be, it was now locked very firmly between the triple moons and the golden planet below, a planet which had once had a name, but was now simply "High Winds Resort." If it had a native species with anything resembling intelligence, they had vanished along with its name.

The Preserve was continually adding new species to its roster, but the real gems were the species that had been there since the beginning, or at least, the beginning of remembrance; they had been carefully cloned, and then bred, until there were herds of the creatures, an entire collection. It was the only place in the universe that a body could go to and view, all together, the beginnings of all the planets in all the worlds. That was the Preserve's tagline. "Within convenient distance of the famed High Winds Resort!" the pamphlet read. "Come visit the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creatures Preserve and view, all together, the beginnings of all the planets in all the worlds! Get in touch with your past! This is a vacation you will never forget!"

This pamphlet, aged and crinkled and bearing a corner that looked as if it'd been nibbled on, was now lying outspread on the Doctor's long fingers, fluttering a little in the afternoon breeze. It had been a long time since he'd held this pamphlet, and it was a similar length of time since he'd thought about it; it was an adventure of a previous incarnation, and those things, inevitably, stayed buried until they were needed. Across the back, over a smiling alien face, a message had been written—not in his handwriting, he was pleased to see; there was no sense in breaking the rules when they didn't need to be broken. (Yet.)

_It's been brought to my attention that the Time Lords are fond of zoos, _the message read. _Perhaps you'd like to visit? Love, Amy. _

"Fond!" said the Doctor. "We invented them!"

"I believe that's the point," said Jamey. "The Time Lords invented _this_ zoo, didn't they?"

The Doctor pursed his lips and gave a noncommittal wiggle of his head. "I'd say so. Yes. Perhaps. It's been years since I—" He stopped. "Since he went."

"It'd have to be, wouldn't it?" asked Grace, flipping over the pamphlet to show a picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. "How could they have a T-Rex unless someone was about who had a TARDIS?"

"I've made contributions, every now and again," the Doctor said with an impish smile. "There's a Gugogondarant in there, very rare, I snatched him off an ice floe in Lower Mezandidi—"

"Focus, dear," said Rose.

"Right," said the Doctor. "I cannot officially confirm nor deny whether this is or isn't a product of Gallifrey, but it did come out of the center of the universe, you know, and the walls are built to contain more than just your average alligator."

"Perhaps they might contain the thing in the Void?" suggested Jamey, with a twinkle in his eyes, only for the Doctor to say, "Are you _nuts_?"

The twins looked at him in blank astonishment.

"That thing has been in the Void for a million-million years, and you think clever walls will contain it?" demanded the Doctor of his children. "This thing chews through _reality_ and you think, hmm, let's stick it amongst a billion vacationers?"

"Well," said Grace, stung, but the Doctor was already talking, and didn't hear her.

"Now if we could only just vacuum up its Void-stuff, I don't see why not," he was saying, very fast and very loud. "Seems like it might work, eh? What's lending it the juice to rip holes in reality? Why's it only begun to do it now?—because it's only recently built up enough Void-stuff to manage it, I bet. Or Void non-stuff. Given that the Void doesn't exist. Hum. But how to steal it away? _How_ to steal it _away_—"

"The float-y black things you mean," said Rose. "You remember?"

"Of course I remember, that's precisely what I mean," said the Doctor. "We need a giant Void-stuff duster, that's what we really need, but the question's how to _build _one. And make it work. If the thing is in the Void, then we'll only be sucking up Void, or trying to, it's too—non-huge—" The Doctor gave a chuckle at this joke of his, which no one else seemed to think was funny, and so without ado he plunged back into the middle of it. "We've got to get this Conqueror out of the Void first, that's what the crux of the matter seems to be, but we're liable to let him loose among the stars and ruin everything unless we're ready."

"Let him loose inside the zoo," said Grace, "and _then_ suck up his Void-stuff."

"We wouldn't have to transport a beast the size of a planet, that's for sure," agreed Jamey.

"Can't do any of it unless we have—"

"—an impossible thing," interrupted Uncle Tony, who was standing with his arms folded and listening to them all intently. "You're talking about making a machine—a real, tangible machine—that's made to collect a kind of particle that by its very definition can't exist. It's like saying that's you're holding antimatter in your hands. You couldn't be, because matter and antimatter can't touch. It's the same principle."

"Is it?" asked the Doctor, his eyebrows leaping upward.

"Of course it is," said Uncle Tony.

"Is it the same sort impossibility," mused the Doctor aloud, "as a box that's bigger on the inside? Or time travel in reverse?"

Uncle Tony's lips pressed together in a thin line. He felt he was being laughed at, and he didn't like it. "No," he said. "All those have been theorized about. All of those—"

"Have been thought of, you mean," said Jamey. "You mean to say that because Earth hasn't thought of it, it can't exist."

There grew across Uncle Tony's cheeks a fierce stain of red. "I mean to say that to the best of my knowledge, a thing that does exist and a thing that doesn't cannot cross paths. That then presents a problem when you want to use something that does exist to collect something that _doesn't_."

"I won't lie," said Joran. "You've lost me. I'm floating in the third hemisphere of Lockadill. Lost forever. Are you talking about creating a self-contained black hole? It's either that or you're talking about taking a feather duster to a giant beast from the Void that calls itself the Conqueror."

The Doctor's head swiveled round to look at Joran, the twins copying him precisely not a half-second later, and three pairs of intense brown eyes bored into Joran's skull. He looked back with some amount of trepidation, but to his credit he didn't look quite as terrified as he used to—Joran thought it was likely that he had reached a certain level of immunity by now, and could no longer be bothered to fear them as he had.

"Oh," said the Doctor. "Oh, that's _brilliant_! Absolutely brilliant! Joran, I could kiss you!"

"Please don't," said Joran, who had been wrong in believing himself immune; what he felt now was very much like fear indeed.

"You're not seriously contemplating such a thing," Uncle Tony said incredulously. "A black hole? Really?"

"Only a small one," the Doctor said in a tiny voice. He lifted up his fingers and moved them together until only a sliver of light showed between them. "_Really_ tiny. Almost insignificant. Practically powerless."

"Then what would be the point?" asked Uncle Tony.

"Bebenzar," said Grace.

Joran gave a discontented grumble that came up from deep inside his chest. "You lost me again."

"Magnetic air, my good man," said Jamey. "Same principle, different mechanism. An itty bitty black hole—a practically powerless hole—"

"Black holes suck in everything," said Joran, realization hitting him like a physical blow. "_Including_ stuff that doesn't technically exist."

"Bingo," said the Doctor. "And I've some experience in trapping Void things. Mix them altogether, and what do you get?"

"A plan that might actually work," Rose said, with a big grin. Her eyes, a lighter shade of brown than her husband's, had in them an eager gleam that came to them but rarely nowadays. "If we're an impossible kind of lucky, that is."

"Ready?" asked the Doctor.

"Ready," said Rose. Her eyes crinkled upward, bearing little hairline wrinkles that hadn't been there seventeen years ago. The Doctor loved them more than he ought to and looked forward to seeing how they deepened.

The Doctor took her hand, just like old times, and whispered in her ear, "Allons-y!"

* * *

The Manager of Affairs, who oversaw the inner mechanisms of the High Winds Resort, took his tea at three o'clock, and not a minute later. His house overlooked the Low Basin inlet, and it was there, down by the quay, that the Manager of Affairs took his daily tea. The weather at the High Winds Resort was always fair, and so there was never any reason to disturb this habit of his. He especially liked, after he'd read the daily reports, to gaze upward at the spectacular sights the horizon afforded: the triple moons, for one, but most especially the behemoth that was the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve. The Preserve was always there, beyond the clouds, like a misshapen fourth moon, and the way the sun's light blew across the shining hull was truly a magnificent thing to behold—especially at three o'clock.

Usually, at three o'clock, there was a stream of glittering beads going from the Preserve to the planet, and at three-oh-five, those beads would reverse direction, and take passengers from the planet up to the Preserve. They were immense ferry ships, built to carry thousands upon thousands of people, and were what the Manager lovingly referred to as his "fleet." Today, however, the ferry ships weren't moving at all: they were frozen in a massive clump betwixt the planet and the Preserve, crowding together in the most horrific traffic jam the Manager had ever seen.

He snapped his fingers, but he was so astonished by the sight in the sky that his fingers slipped, and he had to try again before it would work. His glasses were dropped into his waiting hand by someone, a servant whose name he had never bothered to learn nor ever would, and he strapped them onto his face with such force that they landed crooked. He barely noticed. With furious fingers he activated the telescopic settings, and a second later, the traffic jam in the sky leapt into sharp relief.

"Lord of Fiery Skies and Damned Seas!" he swore, and the servants standing beside his chair gave a start and crossed themselves hurriedly. The Manager took no notice. He was too busy looking at an entire fleet of ships, frozen between the High Winds Resort planet and the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve, for absolutely no reason at all. There was no debris, no pirates, no solar flares; he supposed there might be some sort of malfunction, but on so massive a scale, it was unthinkable!

It was entirely by accident that his head twitched far enough that the Preserve itself came into view; otherwise, he might have made his inquiries after the ships and beaten in heads but otherwise gone along as ignorant as the ferry ship pilots. Luck—or fate—or both—moved his eyes far enough to the left that they caught on an ominous glow in one of the Preserve's empty paddocks, one of the immense sections of the zoo that were left open in case some immense creature happened to come their way. The glow went three ways, in the shape of a triangle, and when he zoomed his glasses in as far as they were capable of going, he saw not far from one of the corners a little blue blip that he thought might be a—

"No," said the Manager, aloud. "That's not really a tanning block, is it?"

"Sir?" asked a servant.

"It _is_ a tanning block," the Manager whispered, absolutely scandalized. There was, on the surface of the Preserve, a tanning block, the sort outfitted for humanoid peoples, in which they could change their skin color at will. These were the sort of things kept by beaches, or in hotels; certainly not on the Preserve! "Who put that there? Who authorized that?"

He pulled loose his glasses, and gave the nearest servant a blood-chilling glare. "Fetch me my phone, son. I have to make a call."

* * *

"Hurry, hurry!" Grace said to Jamey, running along behind him with a mass of wiring wrapped around and around her arms. As they ran, Jamey uncoiled the wiring from her arms and laid it out around the already fizzling energy field, adding a secondary barrier. It was just insurance, a last minute thing they'd convinced their father that they needed, but one the twins thought absolutely essential. If this thing—the Conqueror—was even half so powerful as they thought, he might overwhelm the first barrier. In fact, the twins even thought it likely.

"I _am_ hurrying," Jamey puffed, taking another glance at the horizon. The Preserve was guarded by a host of unmanned ships, but thus far, they hadn't seen any, but only because Joran had jammed the navigational systems of the ferry ships, and there was no one left on the Preserve. If there was no one left on the Preserve, there was no one left to see the mischief of the Smiths (plus two), and they were too far from the edges of this particular compound for the security cameras to be of any use. But that wasn't going to last for long, and they knew it. They had to do this _now_.

Finally they made their last pass, and made the necessary connections; Grace gave the signal to her mother, who was leaning out of the TARDIS, and her mother gave the signal to the Doctor. The second barrier lit up, the same color as the first—cherry limeade, Grace thought—and blazed so bright that she could feel it against her skin.

"Get ready!" Rose yelled.

* * *

"What do you mean, you haven't got a clue?" the Manager of Affairs roared into his phone, or at least, what passed for one at the High Winds Resort; it looked like a long rubber Lego block. "There's something going on inside the Preserve, man, and whatever it is, I'd bet my pension that it's what's keeping the fleet from moving. Think of all the money that's not being spent! Think of the _money_, man!"

"I am, sir," the voice on the other end said. It was the voice of the Head of Security, and it was not a voice much inclined, at the moment, to be pleasant. "I'm thinking that if we go in there, guns blazing, and find ourselves outmatched, it's going to cost a small fortune to fix. That's assuming we aren't all _dead_."

The Head of Security (whose friends called him Marty) had tried to explain this to the Manager already—twice—but had not yet tried using such clear monetary terms, but the instant he did, the Manager cottoned on. "Very true," he murmured into the phone. "Very true. Absolutely inconceivable risk. Send in a single scout ship to see what's what."

"Very good, sir," said Marty, Head of Security. "Will do, sir."

"And hurry!" the Manager added, at a shout, and threw his phone at a nearby servant so hard that it pinged neatly off the crown of his head. It made him feel a little better, but whatever value it might have had was worth very little in the face of his stone-cold tea, sitting on a table down by the quay. He felt he might cry. He really did hate cold tea.

* * *

Sure enough, just as they began flipping switches and turning dials, a ship appeared on the horizon, small and quick; the red stripes on its sides marked it as a scout. This would be Joran's job. He climbed up on top of the TARDIS, armed with a fearsome-looking cannon, which had to lean against one hip in order to heft, and aimed it towards the oncoming ship. A building whine sounded in the air, and into the mechanically refreshed air of the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve he bellowed, "The name's Lieutenant Joran, officer of the Second Earth Dynasty Marine Corps, Attack Class, and I am here to categorically ruin your day!"

With the twins below, shading their eyes in order to better see Joran, Joran slammed his fist down on the cannon's trigger; from out of its mechanical maw came a beam of light, long and thin but blazing with energy that crackled and made Joran's hair stand on end. It struck scout ship dead center and shorted out all of its systems, right down the list, and out of the sky it dropped. Joran whooped.

"Nice _shot_," called Jamey, impressed, and Joran gave him a snappy salute. The cannon had been Joran's idea, but the Doctor had had some rules about the use of deadly force, and so Joran had done the best he could—and the best he could was a broad-spectrum electronic dampening field. He'd used them before, to great effect, but nothing could quite compare to an EDF cannon with the power of the TARDIS behind it.

"Thank you," Joran said, once he'd jumped down off the top of the TARDIS. He left the cannon on top just in case the noodle-heads on the planet below decided to send another scout.

"All clear!" Grace was saying, her head disappearing inside the TARDIS's doors. A low hum built in the air, stirring up a small breeze, and in the center of the bright-colored barriers appeared a hole. It was small at first, barely more than a crack in the dirt, but soon expanded until it was nearly the entire length and breadth of the triangular barriers.

Jamey sauntered up to the edge of the barriers and leaned casually over. "Hullo," he said, as if talking down a well. "Anyone home? Monsieur Conqueror?"

The darkness grumbled.

"Perhaps I've caught you at a bad time," Jamey said. "I just wanted to warn you that we're going to close up this hole. It's only recently opened, we were lucky to see it. However, this time we've come prepared. Once we shut this one, all the others will be shut, as well." He paused. "Permanently."

_You lie_, the Conqueror's voice growled from the depths.

"Do you think?" asked Jamey. He began moseying along the edges of the barrier, hands in his pockets, blond hair swooshed into a truly spectacular upward direction. "I think I recall besting you with a screwdriver. A _screwdriver_. I've upgraded my toys somewhat since then."

There was a monstrous roar, and upward out of the hole came first the nose, then the eyes, then the jaw, and soon the entire head of the Conqueror; it was black like death and brought with it a kind of coldness that was felt only in the soul. Its eyes rolled back and forth as it tried to shimmy its shoulders through, and while it worked, the Doctor turned on his modified triangulation device. It no longer simply traced energy, but captured it. And with the miniature black hole in the very center, there was nothing it could not trap.

The Conqueror bellowed a bellow that shook the entire Preserve, and struggled to free his shoulders; he got one elbow free, and then another, and was working at his claws when the device kicked in. All the Void stuff the Conqueror had soaked up, all the emptiness it had drank in to fill up its empty belly, went streaming into the teensy-weensy black hole. The black of its hide became less and less dismal, and the glow of his eyes less and less vivid, and even the size of him shrank, until they were looking at a very great but very pissed off lizard, some hundred feet tall.

"It's working!" cried Uncle Tony, delighted, which of course ruined everything.

The Manager of Affairs, down on the planet, was not the brightest of light bulbs, and very much driven by a gut full of pride; his dead scout ship enraged him to the point of mania, and after throwing an entire tin of biscuits at the face of his cook, he ran down to his office and ordered an attack. Technically speaking the High Winds Resort was a (peaceful) business establishment, but it was a planetary business, and then some, and therefore necessitated defensive systems. One such system was a collection of missiles, housed beneath the Burning Sea.

And so, just as Uncle Tony was expressing his unfortunate sentiments, the Manager of Affairs was screaming into a com-device to "_goddamn fire_!" From the middle of the Burning Seas shot one missile, two missiles, three; and they went streaking up out of the atmosphere and went barreling straight for the Preserve.

Now, had the Manager been thinking clearly, he would have ordered the scout ships to be arrayed in military formation, and sent up to attack as such. They were armed and could certainly handle it, and would, besides, render minimal damage to the High Winds Resort's primary source of income. The missiles, however, were of a different class altogether. One missile might have made quite a sizeable and expensive dent, and two would blow a hole; three, though, might very well explode into the internal structure, which no one in any galaxy knew how to operate, much less repair.

The Smiths, plus two, stared open-mouthed at the sky while the Conqueror struggled inside his neon-red energy barriers, and watched the three missiles coming toward them. "Bad luck," said Jamey, and took up his sister's hand.

"That's rather unfriendly," the Doctor said mildly, and went back inside his TARDIS. The missiles, as they watched, turned round, and then began to trace a lazy shape in the space between the planet and the Preserve: "HA-HA-GOT-YOUR-TOYS!"

Down in his office, the Manager let out a scream of wrath and hatred and despair, though if he had understood exactly what was happening, he probably would have shaken the Doctor's hand. A specimen like the Conqueror would be a priceless addition to their collection.

A little bell went off inside the TARDIS, a helpful ding-ding-ding. The Doctor shouted at them, "He's done!" and then blew up the missiles, which were now a safe distance from the planet, the triple moons, the ferry ships and, most importantly, the Preserve. They all bolted for the TARDIS. This part of their plan had to be synchronized very carefully between how fast the TARDIS could depart and how fast the Conqueror could move, neither of which had been tested, and so just as the engines engaged the power to the barriers was cut, and the Conqueror was let loose.

Up they spun, out of the Conqueror's reach, and they watched the thing that had been frightening jump and swat at them like a spastic Godzilla-would-be. The trouble was that the Conqueror looked nothing at all like Godzilla—more like an angler fish with claws—but it had lizard-skin, and that was enough.

"You should phone whoever was trying to missile us, dear," said Rose, even as Joran shouted in utter agony, "You took off with my cannon up top!"

They all looked at him.

"It's gone!" he wailed. "D'you know how long it took me to build it?"

"Yes," said Grace. "I helped you."

"There, there," said Uncle Tony. "We'll find you a nice pub once we've got back."

Joran, eyes wide, took a flying leap at Uncle Tony, who yelped and went dashing into the back.

"I really should," said the Doctor, ignoring the lot of them. "And maybe afterwards we'll have a day at the zoo. What do you think?"

"I think a day at the zoo sounds lovely, dear," said Rose.


End file.
